The Raspberry Pi is made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK charity organization. For this reason the Debian SD card image (and presumably the others) default to the English – UK locale, timezone, and keyboard layout. For those of us in America, this is clearly not going to work! Clayton Smith excellently documents the procedure for Canadian’s in this post on his blog. I followed his procedure, replacing en_CA with en_US. To make it a little easier to follow, I have turned this into a photo-tutorial using PuTTY to remotely SSH into the device from my Windows 7 running Desktop PC.
First up is logging in, which uses the username pi
and password raspberry
.
![Login to Raspberry Pi](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/01-Login.png)
Next, change the system locale from en_GB.UTF-8
; to en_US.UTF-8
by running the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
.
![Configure Locales (1)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/02-Configure-Locales-1.png)
Use the arrow keys to move up/down and highlight options. Use the spacebar to select/deselect the options.
![Configure Locales (2)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/03-Configure-Locales-2.png)
![Configure Locales (3)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/04-Configure-Locales-3.png)
Press tab to select <Ok> and then press enter.
![Configure Locales (4)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/05-Configure-Locales-4.png)
Confirm your selection.
![Configure Locales (5)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/06-Configure-Locales-5.png)
The Raspberry Pi will now generate the selected locales.
![Configure Locales (6)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/07-Configure-Locales-6.png)
Now, it’s time to set the keyboard layout. Run the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
.
![Configure Keyboard](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/08-Configure-Keyboard.png)
Next, we need to set the timezone. Run the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
.
![Configure Timezone (1)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/09-Configure-Timezone-1.png)
Use the up/down arrows to select the appropriate location and press enter.
![Configure Timezone (2)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/10-Configure-Timezone-2.png)
Use the up/down arrows (again) to select the appropriate timezone (closest city in your timezone) and press enter.
![Configure Timezone (3)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/11-Configure-Timezone-3.png)
The Raspberry Pi will acknowledge the timezone change.
![Configure Timezone (4)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/12-Configure-Timezone-4.png)
Next up is to modify the Debian packages source to use the US mirror (rather than the British one). Run the command sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list
.
![Configure Sources (1)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/13-Configure-Sources-1.png)
Change the uk to match your two digit country code (us for me).![Configure Sources (2)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/14-Configure-Sources-2.png)
Write the changes to disk by pressing escape and then entering :w
and pressing enter.
![Configure Sources (3)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/15-Configure-Sources-3.png)
vi (the text editor) will confirm that the changes were written to the disk.
![Configure Sources (4)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/16-Configure-Sources-4.png)
Quit vi (the text editor) by entering :q
and pressing enter.
![Configure Sources (5)](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/17-Configure-Sources-5.png)
Then, run sudo apt-get update
to update the package lists with the new source.
![Update Source Lists](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/18-Update-Source-Lists.png)
Finally, run sudo reboot
to reboot the Raspberry Pi and confirm your changes.
![Reboot](https://rohankapoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/19-Reboot.png)
Congratulations, your Raspberry Pi has been “Americanized!”