While it is possible to create new locale data, it is a fair bit of work. You can however select different locales for different uses through the various LC_* environment variables (this is what the Language Settings control panel does when you choose a different language). This may be enough for what you want.

The locale man page provides some details of the various locale categories (see the Environment Variables section). Some variables you might be interested in include:

• LC_MEASUREMENT - Measurement units (Metric or Other).


• LC_PAPER - Paper size.


• LC_NUMERIC - Non-monetary numeric formats. I'm not sure whether this one would be relevant though, since I don't think there is much difference in the way US writes their numbers.

If you want to change any of these, I would suggest doing it by editing ~/.profile and adding a line like:

export LC_XXX="YYY"

Since that is how the current language selector stores its preferences.

Setting any of these environment variables to a locale that uses metric measurements (e.g. en_AU.utf-8 or en_NZ.utf-8) should help change the defaults various applications use.

There will probably still be a few applications that default to US measurement formats though, since I've seen a few that effectively use LC_MESSAGES to pick units (usually by attempting to translate a special string and rely on the translator to translate it in a way that indicates the desired units). For those you'll either have to live with the US default, or change the messages locale to something else (which will probably have the side effect of switching to British English).