How do I get GDM to respect my locale settings?
Up until GNOME 2.20, GDM would read the locale settings from /etc/login.conf or ~/.login.conf. This was broken in 2.20, and finally restored in GDM 2.26.1_3.
However, GDM also offers a pull-down Language menu from which you can choose your current locale. If you would rather not use this menu or /etc/login.conf, you can set the locale by adding the following to ~/.profile:
export LANG=<locale>
export LC_ALL=<locale>
Here, <locale> is the desired locale (e.g. en_US.UTF-8, es_ES.ISO8859-15, fr_FR.ISO8859-1, etc.).
To set the default locale for the GDM greeter, add the same environment variables to /etc/profile or define gdm_lang to the desired locale in /etc/rc.conf.
Оно?