English Language and Danish Regional Setting in FreeBSD

This is the procedure for configuring localization (locale) for English language and Danish regional setting in FreeBSD. Tested on FreeBSD 14.2 with XFCE 4.20 on 2025-03-31.

Introduction.

I have tested the official FreeBSD handbook procedure. I have tested countless guides and advice from forums, discussions and website. They have all failed to meet my basic requirements: English language and Danish regional setting in system console, window manager and applications. See my test below. I wanted Danish ISO 8601 standard format for date, time and numbers. This is also known as YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. I did not want to see US imperial format for date, time and numbers. I suddently had an idea of hacking an existing English locale and simply linking to a Danish for regional setting. It turned out to work perfect.

What is a locale setting?

A locale setting is made up of the language, the regional setting and the character encoding standard. As an example, en_DK.UTF-8 locale would be for user, who prefer English language in a Danish regional setting with the UTF-8 character encoding standard.

Locale specific information can be proveded with the locale utility. It is important to know, that the utility respect the PATH_LOCALE environment variable. If this is set, then this is used instead of the default locale directory.

# locale -a | grep DK
da_DK.ISO8859-1
da_DK.ISO8859-15
da_DK.UTF-8

Create a new locale.

Create a new locale definition, that is based on English. This new locale definition will be English language with Danish regional setting and UTF-8 character encoding standard.

# cd /usr/share/locale/
# mkdir -p en_DK.UTF-8
# cp -r en_GB.UTF-8/* en_DK.UTF-8/

Link to Danish regional setting.

For time format, numeric format and monetary format, create symbolic links to the Danish locale definition.

# cd en_DK.UTF-8/
# ls
LC_COLLATE	LC_CTYPE	LC_MESSAGES	LC_MONETARY	LC_NUMERIC	LC_TIME
# ln -sf ../da_DK.UTF-8/LC_TIME .
# ln -sf ../da_DK.UTF-8/LC_NUMERIC .
# ln -sf ../da_DK.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY .

# locale -a | grep DK
da_DK.ISO8859-1
da_DK.ISO8859-15
da_DK.UTF-8
en_DK.UTF-8

# nano /etc/login.conf
default:\
        :passwd_format=sha512:\
        :copyright=/etc/COPYRIGHT:\
        :welcome=/var/run/motd:\
        :setenv=BLOCKSIZE=K:\
        :mail=/var/mail/$:\
        :path=/sbin /bin /usr/sbin /usr/bin /usr/local/sbin /usr/local/bin ~/bin:\
        :nologin=/var/run/nologin:\
        :cputime=unlimited:\
        :datasize=unlimited:\
        :stacksize=unlimited:\
        :memorylocked=64K:\
        :memoryuse=unlimited:\
        :filesize=unlimited:\
        :coredumpsize=unlimited:\
        :openfiles=unlimited:\
        :maxproc=unlimited:\
        :sbsize=unlimited:\
        :vmemoryuse=unlimited:\
        :swapuse=unlimited:\
        :pseudoterminals=unlimited:\
        :kqueues=unlimited:\
        :umtxp=unlimited:\
        :pipebuf=unlimited:\
        :priority=0:\
        :ignoretime@:\
        :umask=022:\
        :charset=UTF-8:\
        :lang=en_DK.UTF-8:

# cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf

Backup and restore the new locale.

Create a backup of the new locale. This ensures, that it can be restored, if it should get deleted. It can also be used to install on another host.

# tar -cvpzf ~/en_DK.UTF-8.tar.gz -C /usr/share/locale en_DK.UTF-8
a en_DK.UTF-8
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_COLLATE
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_TIME
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_NUMERIC
a en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES

The content can be confirmed.

# tar -tvf ~/en_DK.UTF-8.tar.gz

The locale setting can be restored.

# tar -xvpzf ~/en_DK.UTF-8.tar.gz -C /usr/share/locale
x en_DK.UTF-8/
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_COLLATE
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_TIME
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MONETARY
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_NUMERIC
x en_DK.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES

Issue: Port misc/locale-en_DK not working.

I tested the official port and package misc/locale-en_DK. This failed Danish special characters input in FreeBSD system console. I even spent extra time testing custom environment variables.

# pkg install locale-en_DK
Message from locale-en_DK-0.1.1:
In order to set the en_DK.UTF-8 locale for the login shell of an single
user add the following configuration to ~/.login_conf:
me:\
        :charset=UTF-8:\
        :lang=en_DK.UTF-8:\
        :setenv=PATH_LOCALE=/usr/local/share/locale:
More information about the process of configuring login class methods in
available in the handbook.
More information about the PATH_LOCALE environment variable is available in the
locale(1) manual page.

References.

• Chapter 25. Localization
• Date / Time / Currency / Other Stuff – Format
• Setting Locale – Accented Characters in Console
• LOCALE in FreeBSD Manual Pages