[xubuntu] setting locale failed

parasvuori · 08-01-2017, 02:25 PM

For several months I had these settings in Xubuntu's 'Language Support':

Language for menus and windows:
English (United States)
English
(other English variants)
Russian

Display numbers, dates and currency amounts in the usual format for:
Russian

However after one of the system updates I started receiving various 'Setting locale failed' errors:

Code:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
	LANGUAGE = "en_US:en",
	LC_ALL = "",
	LC_MEASUREMENT = "en",
	LC_PAPER = "en",
	LC_MONETARY = "en",
	LC_NAME = "en",
	LC_COLLATE = "en_US.UTF-8",
	LC_CTYPE = "en_US.UTF-8",
	LC_ADDRESS = "en",
	LC_NUMERIC = "en",
	LC_MESSAGES = "en_US.UTF-8",
	LC_TELEPHONE = "en",
	LC_IDENTIFICATION = "en",
	LC_TIME = "en",
	LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Several apps (gnome-split for instance) failed to start unless I executes them with LC_ALL variable set to something (en_US.UTF-8). But I don't want to set LC_ALL permanently because I want these region-specific Russian settings.

I have both en_US.UTF-8 and ru_RU.UTF-8 generated and set in dpkg-reconfigure locales, but the error persists:

Code:

perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL 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
  ru_RU.ISO-8859-5... done
  ru_RU.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
*** update-locale: Warning: LANGUAGE ("en_US:en") is not compatible with LC_ALL (). Disabling it.

jpollard · 08-02-2017, 10:31 AM

This appears to be a small configuration error - it is reporting it can't find the DEFAULT locale, not that it can't use one.

Usually that would be specified in the file /etc/locale.conf (at least on Fedora, and from the Ubuntu man pages, the same).

DavidMcCann · 08-02-2017, 11:11 AM

I think the problem may be setting LC_ALL="" rather than LC_ALL= — in other words, setting it to something meaningless rather than just not setting it. Another option would be LC_ALL=C.

I'm not positive about this — locale problems seem to be a Debian thing! — but it's worth trying.

parasvuori · 08-02-2017, 08:16 PM

I actually didn't have /etc/locale.conf file. Having created it, I set there LC_ALL to "" to no effect. Further research showed that I have a configuration similar to what I'm going after in /etc/default/locale file:

Code:

#  File generated by update-locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
#LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
LC_NUMERIC="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT=ru_RU.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION="ru_RU.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
#
#LANGUAGE="en_US:en"

I copied this configuration inside locale.conf but the change got completely ignored again and I received the same errors. Manually sourcing the file however removed all the errors but added weird unsupported characters here and there in the terminal outputs. Can't even wrap my head around what can be wrong here.

jpollard · 08-03-2017, 05:32 AM

Well, mixing Russian and English can do that.

parasvuori · 08-04-2017, 04:59 PM

But it never did before. I've had this settings for half a year now. I don't get why either /etc/default/locale or /etc/locale.conf get ignored and my locale settings are being set to something completely unrelated.

jpollard · 08-05-2017, 05:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by parasvuori

But it never did before. I've had this settings for half a year now. I don't get why either /etc/default/locale or /etc/locale.conf get ignored and my locale settings are being set to something completely unrelated.

I may be some change was done to how the locale is being handled. Perhaps some earlier bug was identified that ignored some of the specifications.

But that would depend on where/how the odd characters are showing up.