GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 645478
Language gets reset to English (United States)
Last modified: 2011-04-07 13:30:44 UTC
In the "Region and Language" panel in gnome-control-center, I selected "French (Canada)" as my language. The setting correctly seems to be applied when I logout and relogin. However, after restarting the computer completely, it is reset back to "English (United States)". Running Fedora 15.
When do you see it "resetting back" to en_US? What's the content of "/var/lib/AccountsService/users/<user name>" before and after rebooting? My guess is that the accounts service somehow loses the information, or something isn't using the information from there. You can also check whether the values are correctly written by selecting your user in the "User Accounts" panel.
I haven't had time to investigate what you suggested just yet, but I think I may have found a possible cause this morning after applying the latest round of updates in F15. Sometimes, the gdm screen doesn't present me with a list of users, it only shows "Other" allowing me to type the user name and password; and that's when it forces the English localization and keyboard layout. At other times, gdm does show my user account with its associated image. At those times, the Canadian French locale and Canada French Dvorak keyboard layout seem to be correctly set at login. Usually, you can toggle between the two behaviors simply by logging in/out multiple times. In addition, the xdg user dirs gtk helper thingy will ask you to update the XDG folder names everytime the locale changes... I'm suspecting a race condition of some sort in gdm (or maybe in Fedora's boot process, but I think it sometimes happen on user logout, so it might not be systemd's fault).
I think this is not a control-center issue, but some problem with the accountsservice.