How to set the timezone in Linux and other useful time and locale commands

To set the timezone in Debian/Ubuntu or CentOS, see these examples:

timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Berlin
timedatectl set-timezone Europe/London
timedatectl set-timezone Africa/Johannesburg

For a list of zones, use the first or the second (filtered) command:

timedatectl list-timezones
timedatectl list-timezones | grep -i europe

Other useful date time commands

This one shows information compared to time sync:

timedatectl

Check if ntp service is running:

service ntp status

Install a more sophisticated time server service (see Notes below):

apt install ntp

Notes:

When you run the above command, you may get this:

Package systemd-timesyncd which provides time-daemon is to be removed

Locale

For some locales, e.g. for use with Firefly III, you might have to first generate the base locale. Warning, the command below might import a whole bunch of English locales that you’ll never use.

sudo apt-get install -y language-pack-en-base

To generate locales on your system, do this:

root@server:~# locale-gen
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

To see all locales:

root@server:~# locale -a
C
C.utf8
POSIX
en_US.utf8

Your application might another locale, e.g. en_ZA. In that case, do this:

root@server:~# locale-gen en_ZA.utf8
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
en_ZA.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
root@server:~# locale -a
C
C.utf8
POSIX
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8

You could also do this:

locale-gen en_ZA

Reference

• https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-time-synchronization-on-ubuntu-20-04
• https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/Configure_Locales_in_Ubuntu