Changing the first day of the week in Slackware Linux

Posted by: Andrew Smith
Poster contact info: asmith16 at littlesvr ca
Author: same as 'Posted by'
Software: Slackware 13.37

Apparently someone has decided that the first day of the week in Canada is sunday, which is completely retarded. My week starts on monday, which I think is how most normal people think.

The problem is that my locale (via LANG) is set to fr_CA.UTF-8, and because of that the XFCE calendar (and some other apps) show sunday as the first day, and get me confused. On occasion this is a serious problem. I finally got off my butt and fixed this problem.

Step 1: edit /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_CA and add the first_weekday line (the following is a snippet, the line I added is in bold):
am_pm   "";""
t_fmt_ampm ""
date_fmt       "<U0025><U0061><U0020><U0025><U0062><U0020><U0025><U0065>/
<U0020><U0025><U0048><U003A><U0025><U004D><U003A><U0025><U0053><U0020>/
<U0025><U005A><U0020><U0025><U0059>"
first_weekday 2
END LC_TIME

LC_PAPER
copy "en_CA"
END LC_PAPER

Then extract a copy of the UTF-8 charset:
gunzip -c /usr/share/i18n/charmaps/UTF-8.gz > /tmp/UTF-8

And finally, run this:
localedef -i /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_CA --charmap /tmp/UTF-8 /usr/lib/locale/fr_CA.utf8/

Now your first day has been changed and the apps should look right after a reboot.

If you want to do this for canadian english (en_CA) I expect you can do the same, just replace all the 'fr' with 'en' in the commands above.