Sorry, previous message has some misprints. This is a correct version. Looks like gdm overrides all locales defined in the system. To manage this I had to redefine GDM_LANGUAGE variable with locale that I intend to use before choosing that locale: so I put in the ~/.profile following strings: GDM_LANGUAGE='ru_UA.UTF-8' export GDM_LANGUAGE LANG='ru_UA.UTF-8' export LANG