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Here is how the clock appears in my gnome shell:

gnome Clock

Even though I'm using the Arabic language, this is not how the clock should be displayed.

Previously, it worked well but now I don't know what happened.

Note: the clock still works well (currently: 9:33) but the only problem is that it appears inverted as you see in the picture above. Also, the date is correct and written in the correct format.

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, gnome shell version 3.10.4. According to the settings, Ubuntu identifies the Arabic language (Lebanon) correctly:

Examples

Mohammad
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  • Is the arabic one displaying right to left (as it should be)? – heemayl Mar 29 '15 at 18:55
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    @heemayl in arabic typing is from right to left but the clock (and other numbers) should appear from left to right. – Mohammad Mar 29 '15 at 18:57
  • @heemayl yes it is. – Mohammad Mar 29 '15 at 18:58
  • oh..i see..did not know that the clock is displayed from left to right in arabic.. – heemayl Mar 29 '15 at 18:58
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    Please can you provide more information regarding your installation. What distribution are using? What version of Gnome Shell is being used? What Arabic language are you using? Thanks – octoquad Apr 03 '15 at 08:59
  • @BrucePieterse I have updated the question. – Mohammad Apr 03 '15 at 15:42
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    @Mhmd,thanks. I have done a bit of testing it seems clutter is rendering the text ltr for everything in the clock, which seems wrong to me. This might be a bug, but let me do some more testing with the GNOME main and staging PPA's. Additionally, some one else reported a similiar problem for a different language five months ago: http://askubuntu.com/questions/541865/gnome-clock-direction-is-reversed – octoquad Apr 04 '15 at 09:24

2 Answers2

4

This looks like a bug. If I enable seconds to be displayed with the hours and minutes using Tweak Tool, the hours and minutes are correct, but the seconds are now placed on the left (using 20:45:18 - H:M:S).

Screen shot of clock taken at 20:45:18

I would definitely file a bug report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-gnome/+filebug

Since this is trivial to reproduce, I will triage it for you so a developer who knows a bit more about this can take a look.

There was one similar, but unrelated bug report I found upstream: Bug 743821 - change in the places of time slots on Arabic desktop.

Best guess at this point is that the time is being split by the colon, and the last piece is moved to the beginning and in your case, the minutes are moved to the beginning:

1 -> 20

2 -> 45

3 -> 18

Becomes

1 -> 18 (3)

2 -> 20 (1)

3 -> 45 (2)

And the really interesting thing is, the lock screen does not have this problem.

Lock screen awesomeness

octoquad
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  • If anybody else is affected by this, please mark yourself as affected on this bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-gnome/+bug/1441312 – octoquad Apr 07 '15 at 19:37
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  1. Install the package dconf-tools from the Ubuntu repositories(available on Software centre). This installs the dconf-editor which is needed for changing the configuration.
  2. Open dconf editor from the Dash or dconf-editor from the shell. In the editor, navigate to com.canonical.indicator.datetime.
  3. Change the time-format field to custom.
  4. In the custom-time-format field, change the value to the desired format. The format can include both the date and time specifiers. This format uses the same specifiers as that of the C standard library function strftime().

eg:

%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M

2015-04-01 Wed 23:45

Alternatively, you can try commands in terminals to so the same as follows:

gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime time-format 'custom'

gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.datetime custom-time-format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M'
Community
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Dhaval Simaria
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  • sorry, none of the two options are working. it seems that it has no effect at all. – Mohammad Apr 03 '15 at 14:03
  • gnome-shell, not unity – Aurelia Apr 03 '15 at 15:47
  • Since you are on gnome,try https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/795/format-clock/ – Dhaval Simaria Apr 03 '15 at 16:44
  • Or try this: Open `gconf-editor` through terminal. When in the gconf-editor, you need to go to `/apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs` and then change the **custom_format** and **format** parameters. I haven't tried it personally but this I believe should work. – Dhaval Simaria Apr 03 '15 at 17:05