locales won't install due to dependance problems

trentham · 08-13-2014, 08:51 AM

I was first alerted to a problem on this Ubuntu server (12.04) when I got an error of

Code:

perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = "en_GB:",
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_GB.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.

This led me to examine the locales set up and found there seemed to be no locales package installed...

Code:

> dpkg --get-selections | grep locales
krb5-locales                                    install
locales                                         deinstall

When I tried to install it I got...

Code:

> apt-get install locales
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  locales: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.9-0ubuntu10) but it is not going to be installed or
                    libc6.1 (>= 2.9-0ubuntu10) but it is not installable
E: Broken packages

So it seems to be complaining about libc6, although a check shows

Code:

> dpkg --get-selections | grep libc6
libc6                                           install
libc6-dev                                       install

I'm now out of my depth! I'm not sure exactly what it's trying to tell me or, more importantly, how I go about fixing it. Any assistance gratefully received!

Guttorm · 08-13-2014, 08:56 AM

Hi

Things like this can happen if you don't run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and you try to install some new package. It depends on newer versions and you havent't upgraded yet.

Try these commands first:

Code:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install

trentham · 08-13-2014, 05:12 PM

I ran those commands and it seemed to do some cleaning and upgrading, then I ran the attempted install of locales but got exactly the same result.

Guttorm · 08-14-2014, 04:04 AM

It sounds like it's "halfway" upgraded.

Does the command "apt-get install" give any error messages? You might need to do "apt-get -f install" if it does. Also check what you have in the file "/etc/apt/sources.list". Is it all 12.04? Version 2.9 is very old. And it seems you are using an older version than that. Running "apt-get dist-upgrade" should upgrade libc to a newer version.

trentham · 08-15-2014, 06:11 AM

apt-get install gives the following...

Code:

# apt-get install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  python-debian aptitude libsigc++-2.0-0c2a libcwidget3 libboost-iostreams1.46.1 python-xapian apt-xapian-index libxapian22 python-chardet
  libept1.4.12
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

trentham · 08-18-2014, 08:17 AM

OK, since this seems to have the community stumped, is there any way I can install the locales package manually?