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The date in the middle of the Panel shows "sön 14:20" I want it to be shown as 2018-03-11 14:20 (ISO 8601)

The date of files in the terminal are also written in a weird format "aug 29 2017", I want it to be written as: 2018-08-29 HH:dd (ISO 8601)

I can see many posts in different websites how to change the date to be displayed according to standard in Ubuntu since many years, but none of them works for me using Ubuntu 17.10.

I see two alternatives. One is to open the DebConf editor and change the value in /com/canonical/indicator/datetime/custom-time-format. I have tried this and added:

%Y-%m-%D %H:%M

It does not work. The date is still shown in the default format.

The other alternative is to add it through the terminal. I have also tried this without any success:

sudo gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime time-format 'custom'

(process:3756): dconf-WARNING **: failed to commit changes to dconf: Error spawning command line “dbus-launch --autolaunch=265b2cb0154141aeb8efd34ee20c7e11 --binary-syntax --close-stderr”: Child process exited with code 1

sudo gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime custom-time-format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'

(process:3779): dconf-WARNING **: failed to commit changes to dconf: Error spawning command line “dbus-launch --autolaunch=265b2cb0154141aeb8efd34ee20c7e11 --binary-syntax --close-stderr”: Child process exited with code 1

Please help me to display time according to the standard.

karel
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Martin Gustafsson
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1 Answers1

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I thought the time format could be set centrally, once and system wide, but it does not seem like it is possible.

So far I have discovered 3 necessary changes to get the time displayed according to ISO 8601 in the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop. This is the way I did:

  1. Install Clock Override from Software Center and add %F %R in the field: "Text to display instead of the clock".

  2. Add alias ls="ls --time-style=long-iso" in ~/.bash_aliases.

  3. Install Nemo from Software Center and replace Nautilus with Nemo as a favorite in the left side bar. In Nemo it is possible to select the time format in Edit->Preferences->Display according to ISO 8601.

In my country, Windows 7 comes configured according to ISO 8601 out of the box. I think it annoying that it is not in Ubuntu and also that these things are still so complicated to accomplish in Ubuntu.

pomsky
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Martin Gustafsson
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