How do I change my LC_* settings in GNOME within my user's locale?

i have this done in my .profile file. here are the relevant lines from my .profile file:

## everything is set to german (datum, uhrzeit, komma, euro)
export LANG=de_DE.utf8
## programs still talk to me in english
export LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
## sort order based on ASCII order
export LC_COLLATE=C

some background explanation: gdm parses .profile (see /etc/gdm/Xsession). gdm also parses .xprofile, but i wanted the LC_* settings for bash and for gnome, so i put it in .profile. the .profile file is read by gnome and by bash if bash is started as a login shell (check the bash manual for an explanation of what a login shell is, generally if you just typed your username and password then it is a login shell). in the standard .profile file provided by ubuntu there is a condition which checks wether .profile is read by bash, in which case it also reads .bashrc, if not then it will not include .bashrc, so gdm will not parse .bashrc.

here is me being smartypants: bash will not read .profile if it finds a .bash_profile first (check the bash manual about startup files). i created a .bash_profile which reads .profile and then .bashrc. this way gnome can read .profile all it wants and won't collide with bash. bash itself will not read .profile because it finds a .bash_profile, which tells bash to read .profile. it's a bit weird but it feels better this way then the way ubuntu (or debian) did it with the condition in .profile.