Cannot change First day of the week in calendar in 12.04

[Andrei]

This is present in Ubuntu 12.04, but from what I've heard, it's way older.

I know that this relates to the locale conception, but what if I want English language AND Monday as the first day of the week ? Right now, if I want English, I have to use en_US locale, but this also triggers Sunday to be set as First day of the week. Why can't I have both ? Can't you make a simple option in the Time & Date settings panel for the First day of the week ? It can't be that hard...

The fix I used:
1. Open a terminal and type in "gksudo gedit /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_US"
2. Find the line starting with "first_weekday". The value for Monday in en_US is 2 (Sunday is 1)
3. Change to "first_weekday 2" (default was 1)
4. Type in terminal "sudo locale-gen"
5. Reboot the computer

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

This bug is an upstream one and it would be quite helpful if somebody experiencing it could send the bug the to the people writing the software. You can learn more about how to do this for various upstreams at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. Thanks in advance!

[Andrei (andrei-doom)]

I'm sorry, but I don't want to make another account just for the sake of this. If you do not think this is logically relevant for an OS to have, then I think I came to the wrong place. It is actually quite a shame this problem doesn't have a solution even now with 12.04. For science's sake, even Windows has this option implemented.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Andrei,
I'd like to point out a couple of misconceptions. Yes, this is covered by the locale concept, but that does not mean what you write in the description of this bug.

If you open Language Support, you see that the display language and regional formats setting are separated. In other words you can pick whichever language you like - that does not affect e.g. the first day of the week.

The choice on the regional formats tab, OTOH, does affect the first day of the week. If you there select en_US, you get Sunday as first day, so you don't want that. If you for instance pick en_GB, you get it 'right', i.e. Monday. en_DK is another choice you may want to try.

There is absolutely no need to edit the en_US locale definition.

[Andrei (andrei-doom)]

I'd also like to point out how ambiguous and ineffective this method is. From a logical point of view, when I think of changing something to my calendar, I look into its settings. Simple as that.

I've tried your option right now. It does what you say, but not exactly how it should. It also modifies the language in which the days are shown in the calendar, even though English still remains everywhere else throughout the system. Why the hell changing the regional settings also changes some language setting ? When I say this method is TOTALLY wrong, I know why I'm saying it.

Look at Android. They finally got to their senses and added a nice little option in the Calendar Settings for "Week starts on:" with the options: "Locale default (!!), Saturday, Sunday, Monday." Is it that hard ? Simple, logical, effective. The current method is totally inefficient. I mean, if even a developer starts scratching their head looking for this option, then this should tell you that something is wrong.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2012-03-07 09:12, Andrei wrote:
> I've tried your option right now. It does what you say, but not exactly
> how it should. It also modifies the language in which the days are shown
> in the calendar, even though English still remains everywhere else
> throughout the system.

That's a bug in the calendar app IMO. It's fully possible to make use of the locale in a more sensible way.

> Look at Android. They finally got to their senses and added a nice
> little option in the Calendar Settings for "Week starts on:" with the
> options: "Locale default (!!), Saturday, Sunday, Monday."

Personally I like that approach. It relies on the LC_TIME locale by default, which I think is important for those of us who don't want to redo the same kind of setting in multiple places. At the same time you can set it explicitly if you like.

There is another bug on this topic, so I mark this report as duplicate.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Dilshod Mukhtarov (dilshodm)]

It would be nice as well if there will be an option to change decimal point sign (in some locales it's "." and in anothers - ",") for numbers and for monetary numbers.