Confconsole - Region config

Overview

The Region config plug in allows users to customize common regional settings on their TurnKey server. Configurable setting include keyboard layout, locales (i.e. language and encoding) and timezone.

Confconsole Region config

This is only useful if you wish to change from the defaults. The TurnKey Linux system defaults are:

  • keyboard: English (US) - aka US International
  • locale:

Keyboard

Select this option to reconfigure the default keyboard layout which your server will use. Default is English (US).

Please note that additional packages are needed to reconfigure this, so your server will need to be connected to the internet to complete this.

If the required package is not already installed, you will be given the option to install it.

Locale

A system "locale" refers to the regional conventions for things such as date and time formatting, character display and currency display. This essentially includes language, although not explicitly (not all programs support alternate languages).

When you first select this option, you will be greated with an extensive list of avaialble locales. Simply scroll through them and use <space> to select/deselect locales.

It is strongly suggested that you leave 'en_US.UTF-8' (the default) enabled as some software requires it to function properly. It is further suggested that you only enable the relevant UTF-8 character set. UTF is generally the acceptd standard.

Important note: You are strongly urged to set the default locale to "None". This ensures that users logging in via SSH can use their local PC locale, rather than being forced to use the system setting.

Note: TurnKey includes a utility called locale-purge. This allows us to keep the size of the instalation as small as possible. The downside of that is that the system by default does not include documentation and for languages other than English. If you do no use English as a first language and would like to restore the non-English documentation, you will need to manually re-install any/all packages for which the alternate language documentation is missing. Please note, not all packages include non-English docs. Also note that this only applies to packages installed prior to setting your locale. All packages installed after setting your locale, will keep everything related to configured locales.

Tzdata

Tzdata relates to the local timezone. On a server, as a general rule it is best to use UTC time. And that is indeed the TurnKey default. However, Linux can be easily configured to adopt a region specific offset.

This means, that whilst the underlaying system will still use UTC, for any users (and software running on the system) it will display the local timezone by default.

Simply select your region. Then select the relevant city/area.

Note: Some PHP applications may require you to also set the timezone in your php.ini file. This confconsole plug in does NOT do that! If you need to do that, you will need to manually adjust that yourself.