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Nigel
Asked: 2011-06-11 12:49:47 +0800 CST

How do I fix the locale problems that seems to turn up when I use VPSs

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On my VPS, when I type locale for a new user I get the following:

tarmac@vps48:~/log$ locale     
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-15
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_TIME="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_PAPER="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_NAME="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.ISO-8859-15"
LC_ALL=

This obviously isn't correct because it throws me all sorts of warnings. How do I fix this?

locale

2 Answers

  1. You can manually create the missing locale definitions: sudo locale-gen en_US.ISO-8859-15.

    Another option is to default to a different locale, for example C.UTF-8 or POSIX which should exist. To try, in bash: export LC_ALL=POSIX. If it works in an interactive session, you can add it to /etc/skel/.bashrc from where it can be picked up to new user home directories by adduser.

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  2. I had to use

    locale-gen en

    to fix this. The 'en' parameter was required and, to my surprise, other alternatives (such as en_GB or en_GB.UTF8) did not seem to work, whereas en did.

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