Yesterday, I used Synaptic to upgrade from Debian Sarge to Etch. At least, I thought I did. I changed my sources.list from stable to testing, clicked mark upgrades, clicked apply and let my pc hum along for about 45 minutes before it finished.

I saw a lot of the following (replace the 'hu' with 'en'):

After unpacking 307kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "hu_HU:hu:en_GB:en",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "hu_HU"
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_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Kde

While the error messages concerned me, everything seemed okay so I rebooted.

Now, X won't start at all. And after I log in at the command line, almost every command is answered with the perl warning above. I'm very confused.

How do I change the locale? What can I do to make perl happy?

I'd really like to avoid re-installing for the time being, because, for now, it would be a hassle.

Could someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

BigVig

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

That worked perfectly.

Now I am having issues with the ATI proprietary video drivers for my ATI Radeon 9600 Pro and the 2.16.15-2-k7(think that's right) kernel. Mostly, I am working out which driver to use, and which video system to use. When I upgraded, Etch installed X.org 6.9.x. And the Radeon driver, when I used Flavio's instructions, wanted X.org <=6.8.99, and I didn't know how to downgrade X.org. So, I re-installed XFree86 4.3 and used the ATI driver installer to install the drivers.

I haven't had the time to verify that my issues with the X server have been resolved yet. I will create another thread later if I am unable to resolve these issues myself.

Thank you again, I knew this was the right place to find an answer.

You can get the newer ati installer 8.21.7, it will build the debs for you. after installing fglrx-kernel-src, you have to apply a patch, search the bug reports for fglrx on bugs.debian.org, build you kernel driver and all is well.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction on the ATI drivers. I had not thought to look in the bug reports for anything on ATI.

1) The locales issue was fixed and things were working all right.

2)a. I completely goofed up re-installing the ATI drivers. I attempted to install the 8.22.5 ATI drivers and did not succeed and X refused to work. Sorry, dracae, I didn't read your post until after I fouled everything up.

2)b. So, not knowing what else to do and since I am really just a newbie at this, I re-installed Sarge repartitioning the hard drive and am going to upgrade to the 2.6.14 K7 kernel when I get back from a vacation.

I will report any questions, failures and successes in a different, more appropriately-named thread.

Thank you to kloss and dracae for your very helpful and very insightful posts.

I can confirm that the latest version of ATi drivers work fine with Xorg 6.9 (with 3d acceleration enabled). I have just installed it in Etch (kernel 2.6.15, ATI driver version 8.22-5).

Thanx kloss.. This also helped me solve my problem