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blogjunkie
Asked: 2011-08-17 19:18:34 +0800 CST

How to fix locale settings in Debian squeeze

  • 772

I occasionally get locale errors and I've tried to run dpkg-reconfigure locales to fix the problem. Here's the output:

:~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = "C"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = "C"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

I looked for /usr/bin/locale but it doesn't exist on my system. Do I need to create it? What do I put in there?

Also I found a related question that says the cause of his problem was in the sshd_config file. The file had the following entry:

AcceptEnv LANG LC_*

I'm mainly concerned that it may cause problems for my VPS, otherwise if it's nothing major I'll be happy to ignore the problem. What should I do? thanks!

localization debian-squeeze

13 Answers

  1. first:

    sudo apt-get purge locales

    then:

    sudo aptitude install locales

    and the famous:

    sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

    This rids the system of locales, then re-installs locales and downgrades libc6 from 2.19 to 2.13 which is the issue. Then configures locales again.

    • 16

  2. If this happens when SSHing to your box, but not on console, try reconfiguring your ssh client (on your local machine). On Mac OS X for example edit /private/etc/ssh_config and comment out

    # SendEnv LANG LC_*

    Thanks to the post of bredman on the Rasberry Pi Bulletin Board.

    • 15

  3. I had this problem for a long time and all the usual advice about dpkg-reconfigure locales, locale-gen, etc didn't help. So I played around a little bit with the environment variables, and what I found was that the system was borking on the LC_CTYPE environment variable! UTF-8 is not a valid value for it. Setting it to en_US.UTF-8 fixed it.

    To make the change permanent, I ran

    update-locale LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

    which writes to /etc/default/locale. And then reboot the system for it to take effect completely.

    • 8

  4. If you disabled PAM authentication for ssh in /etc/ssh/sshd_config (UsePAM no) the responsible configuration in /etc/pam.d/login isn't effective:

    session required pam_env.so readenv=1 envfile=/etc/default/locale

    The result: /etc/default/locale seems to have no effect.

    So you have to configure your client to send the LANG vars or export the env vars in the profile scripts like ~/.profile, ~/bashrc etc.

    More: http://wiki.debian.org/Locale#Standard

    • 3

  5. I've seen this before on older Debian installs, and while annoying, I've never seen it cause a problem.

    If 

      /usr/bin/locale

    is missing, try (as root):

      apt-get install libc-bin

    that should install libc-bin, providing /usr/bin/locale.

    That AcceptEnv line in your sshd_config is pretty standard, and shouldn't be the the cause of your problem here.

    • 2

  6. Did the following, as Manoj, but added it to #~/.bashrc:

    export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.utf8
    • 2

  7. Mac connecting to a fresh Debian 10 install. None of the answers googled all over Stack Exchange helped. Here's what did (and was straightforward and reliable too):

    sed -i "s/^AcceptEnv/#AcceptEnv/g" /etc/ssh/sshd_config

    Run this on your Debian box and it will stop the connecting mac terminal from messing up the server locales (more info).

    As a bonus, that may even improve security of the server.

    • 2

  8. If you are getting the errors while ssh'ing to a remote system, and don't want to modify the remote system (by changing the sshd_config, for instance), you can do the following on your local system (assuming bash)

    export LC_ALL=en_US
export LANGUAGE=en_US

    and then ssh user@remote

    • 1

  9. On my fresh Debian installation (minimal) locales was completely missing. Installing it (aptitude install locales) and running locale-gen did the trick though. So guys, do as Chad Feller mentioned but check for having the package locales installed first.

    • 1

  10. I was using German VPS and couldn't change locale because there was no English language pack installed.

    After installing I could finally change locale

    aptitude install language-pack-en
    • 1