How to set localization of SDDM login screen?

nagmat84 · Apprentice Joined: 27 Mar 2007 Posts: 205

I upgrade to Plasma 5 (KDE 5) and now have SDDM as the login manager. I can apply a theme to it (through the KCM 5 control panel) but how do I set the localization?

Interestingly, as soon as a user has logged in and locks its session, the lock screen is localized to German (because this is the locale of the user) but on start-up the login screen is in English.

toralf · Posted: Sun Sep 06, 2015 5:27 pm Post subject:

you mean this ?

nagmat84 · Apprentice Joined: 27 Mar 2007 Posts: 205

No, keyboard layout is fine. It is already German. I mean the language and localization settings. The login screen should say "Herunterfahren" instead of "Shut down", "Benutzer wechseln" instead of "New user session", and so on. The clock should display the time in 24-hour-format instead of 12-hour-am/pm-format and so on.

SDDM shows the correct German localization if it is used as a lock screen for a user session that has German localization. So the language files must be there. It cannot be a missing package. But SDDM switches to English localization if no user is logged in. This is the case right after boot before anybody has logged in or after the last user has logged out.

papu · Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2015 8:47 am Post subject:

charles17 · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 3664

nagmat84 · Apprentice Joined: 27 Mar 2007 Posts: 205

Yes, I have user-defined locale settings in the home directory, i.e. ~/.bashrc for shells and in ~/.xinitrc for X. I have not set a global locale through /etc/env.d/20locale or more precisely /etc/env.d/20locale set the character encoding to UTF-8 such that file names and other stuff is displayed correctly but it does not set anything else.

In the past I was used to set a global locale through /etc/env.d/20locale but I abstain from that nowadays, because I experienced to many failing applications/scripts. For example, if a script parses the output of something and this something inserts a "," (comma) or a "." (point) into a number to separate the thousands, then many scripts fail, because they expect "plain" numbers. I know there are many web pages that recommend to set a global locale, but I am out of it. It caused too much trouble and strange behaviour in the past. So I only set LC_ALL="C.UTF-8" on a global level to get the character encoding right, but do not do any formatting beyond that. LC_ALL="C.UTF-8" is also the system default by Debian for the very same reason.

charles17 · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 3664

nagmat84 · Apprentice Joined: 27 Mar 2007 Posts: 205

No, it does not seem to use LINGUAS. My hope was that there is a (perhaps undocumented) setting in /etc/sddm.conf that selects a GUI language independent of the system locale. (The same way as one can set the language of most desktop environments independent of any LC_* environment variable.)

At the moment I am considering to patch the /usr/lib/systemd/system/sddm.service file. Each of systemd's startup scripts has an entry that can point to a file that contains environment variables to set/unset. This way I can select a locale that only applies to SDDM but leaves the rest of the system unaffected. But patching /usr/lib/systemd/system/sddm.service in not a very clever idea, because it will be overwritten during the next update.

charles17 · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 3664

nagmat84 · Apprentice Joined: 27 Mar 2007 Posts: 205

There are several ways to set the locale being used by SDDM without patching anything and without modifying the global system locale. You can use any of the files

/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/02-locale
/usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup

and put the following code into it

charles17 · Advocate Joined: 02 Mar 2008 Posts: 3664