Changing locale language in Gentoo Linux

Question

I am trying to switch from French to English.

I did:

export LANG="en_EN.UTF-8"
env-update

I appears to work, but when I open a new SSH window it remains in French!

This is (quite obviously) not a programming question. Voting to close and move to Super User.
You are probably looking for ~/.bashrc, or /etc/env.d/02locale, see docs: gentoo.org/doc/en/guide-localization.xml#doc_chap2_pre1 voting for close.

Marin Hannache · Answer 1 · 2013-01-17 18:58:00Z

First, make sure you 'activated' the locale you want to use, edit /etc/locale.gen and uncomment the following line:

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8.

Then, as root, you must run:

# locale-gen

You can now set the system locale by using eselect (which will create a file in env.d containing LANG="en_EN.UTF-8" and run env-update):

# eselect locale set en_US.utf8

migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 11 '12 at 10:32