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The Shurrican
Asked: 2011-01-30 03:52:08 +0800 CST

Correctly changing default locale in ubuntu server 10.04 LTS?

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I got a new server but unfortunately the hoster only installs me Ubuntu 8.04 in german.

So the upgrade worked smoothly, but now I am trying to change the system to english.

I adapted /etc/environment

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"
LANG="en_us.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="de_DE:en_US:de_LU:de_CH:de_BE:de_AT"

And after searching forums I installed update-locale which generated the file /etc/default/locale

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"
LANG="en_us.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="de_DE:en_US:de_LU:de_CH:de_BE:de_AT"

(this is the file i commonly remember from debian systems to hold the locale)

then i did dpkg-reconfigure locales which configured all the locales and after log out and relogin almost everything was in english.

almost

the welcome messages is. the programs come in english. but for example apt is not:

prag341:~# apt-get upgrade
Paketlisten werden gelesen... Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut       
Status-Informationen einlesen... Fertig
Die folgenden Pakete werden aktualisiert:
  linux-image-generic
1 aktualisiert, 0 neu installiert, 0 zu entfernen und 0 nicht aktualisiert.
Es müssen 4,346B an Archiven heruntergeladen werden.
Nach dieser Operation werden 0B Plattenplatz zusätzlich benutzt.
Möchten Sie fortfahren [J/n]?

which is a very bad thing because then the default arguments Y/N become exchanged by J/N etc.

How can i correctly change the locale to default us english in uft8 as if i had installed it from the beginnig?

ubuntu language localization ubuntu-10.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You're very close! You just need to change your preferred language list

    From this

    LANGUAGE="de_DE:en_US:de_LU:de_CH:de_BE:de_AT"

    To this

    LANGUAGE="en_US"

    Once this is done reboot your server and all the system languages should be in English

    • 6

  2. But first you need to have needed language pack installed. On my German based VPS there was no english language pack pre-installed. So first you check that you have it installed:

    aptitude install language-pack-en
    • 0