As per Where is Maven Installed on Ubuntu it will first create your settings.xml on /usr/share/maven2/, then you can copy to your home folder as jens mentioned
$ cp /usr/share/maven3/conf/settings.xml ~/.m2/settings.xml
You can find your maven files here:
cd ~/.m2
Probably you need to copy settings.xml in your .m2 folder:
.m2
cp /usr/local/bin/apache-maven-2.2.1/conf/settings.xml .m2/
If no .m2 folder exists:
mkdir -p ~/.m2
.m2 directory on linux box usually would be $HOME/.m2
$HOME/.m2
you could get the $HOME :
echo $HOME
or simply:
cd <enter>
to go to your home directory.
other information from maven site:http://maven.apache.org/download.html#Installation