Fra
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/1104.barr.html :
<rip>
"I found Bill Eastman on the #knoppix channel on irc.openprojects.net and asked for guidance. He walked me through the language localization change. It's easy if you know where it is. I simply right-clicked on the DE in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and a menu appeared. I chose English and applied it. When I restarted X, I could read the menus and use a familiar keyboard layout again. Eastman later informed me that if I had entered Lang=us at boot time, the language/locale would not have reverted to German.
Eastman doesn't use Gnome so he couldn't help me get my favorite environment back. A quick visit to the #debian channel on the same IRC gave me an easy way to fix that. All I needed to do was apt-get install gdm and restart X. Now I was cooking."
</rip>