Localizing the appliance

This section describes setting localization options such as the keyboard layout and the time zone. The UI, however, cannot be localized.

Setting the keyboard layout

The console keyboard layout can be temporarily changed using the loadkeys command to test that a keyboard layout works correctly.

To change the keyboard layout to a US layout, enter the following command:

[root@london01 ~]# loadkeys us
[root@london01 ~]# 

To change the keyboard layout to a UK layout, enter the following command:

[root@london01 ~]# loadkeys uk
[root@london01 ~]# 

After you have determined that the layout works correctly, you should make the change permanent. To do so, enter the following command:

[root@london01 ~]# localectl set-keymap uk
[root@london01 ~]# 

You can find a suitable keyboard mapping file with the following command, replacing the grep search term as required:

[root@london01 ~]# localectl list-keymaps | grep -i uk
atari-uk-falcon
dvorak-uk
gb-dvorakukp
mac-uk
sunt5-uk
sunt6-uk
uk 
[root@london01 ~]# 

See the ISO website to find the code for the country you require. For example, us (United States), uk (United Kingdom), de (Germany), and no (Norway).

Setting the system timezone

The system-wide time zone in Linux is defined by the timedatectl utility and /etc/localtime.

The time setting is used by the system during upgrades to ensure that /etc/localtime references the latest information. The value set by timedatectl must reference one of the time zone data files in /usr/share/zoneinfo/. These files contain all the time zone and daylight savings rules for a particular location (for example, /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London contains all the data for London). These files are part of the base packages installed by the system (they are from the tzdata package in CentOS and RHEL).

To set the time zone, as the root user, use timedatectl set-timezone and specify the timezone. You must restart the tideway service to bring the time zone change into effect. For example, to set the time to New York time:

[root@london01 ~]# timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York
[root@london01 ~]# 
[root@london01 ~]# date
Wed 14 Mar 11:17:27 EDT 2018
[[root@london01 ~]# exit
[tideway@london01 ~]$ tw_service_control --restart

Setting the system time

You can set the time using the date command. For example, to set the date and time, enter the following command:

[root@london01 ~]# timedatectl set-time "2018-03-14 15:50:30"
[root@london01 ~]# date
Wed 14 Mar 15:50:33 GMT 2018
[root@london01 ~]# 

The format for the date string is HH:MM:SS YYYYMMDD.

You can also configure the appliance to synchronize the internal clock to an ntp server. See Configuring the NTP client at the command line for more information.