First day of week - Sunday vs. Monday

English Applications
1

Hello there!

Some people use OpenSUSE in English, instead of their own language for some reasons. (Like me, I use Hungarian nevertheless it is one of the best translations).
Some percent of these fellow OpenSUSE users have a little problem when they look at the calendar. Sunday is the first day of the week. Although we are not using our own languages, we are still used to Monday…

Now some years ago I asked for help on the forums for this. I did not receive any replies, but later I found a solution. Sadly, I did not write it down, so I forgot it.
Today I faced the same problem, saw my unanswered topic here and searched for the solution. I found it! It is a bit awful solution as you have to edit the English localization file, but works.

Enough talking, here is the trick (you need to be root):

  1. Back up!

  2. Edit the file /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_US
    Find first_weekday and set it to 2, so the line in the file should read:

first_weekday 2
  1. “Compile” the locales:
gunzip -c /usr/share/i18n/charmaps/UTF-8.gz > /tmp/UTF-8
localedef -i /usr/share/i18n/locales/en_US --charmap /tmp/UTF-8 /usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8
rm /tmp/UTF-8

Thanks for jaumellarden who thought this solution should be inserted into an Ubuntu thread, so OpenSUSE users like us know what to do instead of running locale-gen.

Source: HOWTO: Set Gnome Calendar First Day of Week - Ubuntu Forums

2

good work, but using KDE3, on openSUSE 10.x (and i suppose also on
Gnome/KDE4 and openSUSE 11.x) there is an easier (GUI) way, click:

Personal Settings - Configure Desktop > Regional & Accessibility >
Country/Region & Language > Time & Date (tab) > First Day of Week (line)

and spin the selector to any of seven days…

–
.~.
/V
/( )
natural^^-^^pilot

3

I’m using Gnome 2.26 and OpenSUSE 11.1, but Gnome does not seem to have this option anywhere.
I might find something useful in Gconf, but I’m good with this solution at the moment.

4

From 11.2, the solution above does not work. To those versions (and probably for every other version), the following is a better and cleaner approach:

Again: First day of week - Sunday vs. Monday - openSUSE Forums

5

first try to install glibc-i18ndata

6

It doesn’t help the OP, who I understand is running on Gnome, but for completeness, I thought I should mention KDE4 has a lovely localisation KCM (KDE Control Module–i.e., configuration page) where you can individually specify pretty much every localisation setting there is. In particular for weekdays, you can set:

  • First day of the week
  • First working day of the week
  • Last working day of the week
  • Week day for special religious observance (I was going to joke that there should be a “None” option to cater for atheists… well, actually there is: “None / None in particular”)