Locales

Recipes > Core Recipes > .. > Locales

It is important you set up locales for all the applications which may need them.

This avoids problems such as this which you might get otherwise:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LANG = "en_GB.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

Install locales:

$ sudo apt-get install locales

You then configure locales with:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Here's what you get:

Package configuration

 ┌──────────────────────────┤ Configuring locales ├──────────────────────────┐
 │ Locales are a framework to switch between multiple languages and allow    │
 │ users to use their language, country, characters, collation order, etc.   │
 │                                                                           │
 │ Please choose which locales to generate. UTF-8 locales should be chosen   │
 │ by default, particularly for new installations. Other character sets may  │
 │ be useful for backwards compatibility with older systems and software.    │
 │                                                                           │
 │ Locales to be generated:                                                  │
 │                                                                           │
 │    [ ] en_DK.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15                                      │
 │    [ ] en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8                                                  │
 │    [ ] en_GB ISO-8859-1                                               ▒   │
 │    [ ] en_GB.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15                                  ▒   │
 │    [*] en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8                                                  │
 │                                                                           │
 │                                                                           │
 │                    <Ok>                        <Cancel>                   │
 │                                                                           │
 └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

I choose to make the new locale the default by highlighting en_GB.UTF-8 and chosing Ok:

Package configuration


 ┌──────────────────────────┤ Configuring locales ├──────────────────────────┐
 │ Many packages in Debian use locales to display text in the correct        │
 │ language for the user. You can choose a default locale for the system     │
 │ from the generated locales.                                               │
 │                                                                           │
 │ This will select the default language for the entire system. If this      │
 │ system is a multi-user system where not all users are able to speak the   │
 │ default language, they will experience difficulties.                      │
 │                                                                           │
 │ Default locale for the system environment:                                │
 │                                                                           │
 │                                None                                       │
 │                                en_GB.UTF-8                                │
 │                                                                           │
 │                                                                           │
 │                    <Ok>                        <Cancel>                   │
 │                                                                           │
 └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

You'll see this output and it may take a little while to generate the locales:

Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_GB.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

(view source)