Locale won't set

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Debian User

I'm runing debian etch, and things worked until recently when I tried
to reconfigure locales. Somehow I found myself in a position where I
can't reconfigure locales, and snooping online suggests there's no
simple solution.

$ 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.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

My impression is that that en_US.UTF-8 _is_ the default locale for
debian, but my changing the default locale from en_US to none does not
help.

The kind of error messages I get from chron, or when triing to install
a package, or when recondiguring locals is:

...
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
en_US.ISO-8859-1... done
Generation complete.
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

There seems to be no problem with my system's supporting en_US:

$ locale -a
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_COLLATE to default locale: No such file or directory
C
POSIX
en_US
en_US.iso88591

What does "no such file or directory" refer to?

Online searching suggested defining environment variables for
LC+CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, LC_COLLATE. The only obviously relevant
environment variable I have is:

$ printenv
...
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
...

Should I go ahead and have root insert environment variables such as LANGUAGE =
"en_US.UTF-8" into its environment and then run # dpkg-reconfigure
locales again?

Haines Brown, KB1GRM

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Locale won't set

Submitted by Mathias Brodala on Fri, 2007-08-31 13:00.

Hi Haines.

Haines Brown, 31.08.2007 18:49:
> There seems to be no problem with my system's supporting en_US:
>
> $ locale -a
> 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_COLLATE to default locale: No such file or directory
> C
> POSIX
> en_US
> en_US.iso88591
>
> What does "no such file or directory" refer to?

Find it out:

$ strace -eopen locale -a

That’s the way it looks like when everything’s OK:

> $ strace -eopen locale -a
> open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3
> open("/lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3
> open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
> open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
> open("/usr/lib/locale", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = 3
> open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY) = 3
> C
> de_DE.utf8
> POSIX
> Process 2577 detached

Maybe it helps.

Regards, Mathias

--
debian/rules

Locale won't set

Submitted by Haines Brown on Sat, 2007-09-01 13:00.

Florian Kulzer writes:

> On Sat, Sep 01, 2007 at 07:28:10 -0400, Haines Brown wrote:
> > I believe I'm getting closer.
> >
> > I can't reinstall locales because with locales broken, I can't install
> > any packages. Is it possible to do a package installation without its
> > calling locales?
>
> Did you already try to reconfigure the "locales" package like this:
>
> LANG=C LC_ALL=C dpkg-reconfigure locales

Unfortunately, that syntax is not supported on my machine. Perhaps I
misunderstood it.

> If the above does not work then you can check if /etc/locale.gen
> contains a line for en_US.UTF-8 and then you can run
>
> locale-gen
>
> directly to create the localization data. (See also the comments in
> /etc/locale.gen.)

That seems to have done it. Thanks for the
clarification. Incidentally, my locale.gen file is not commented for
some reason.

Haines Brown, KB1GRM

Locale won't set

Submitted by Johannes Wiedersich on Fri, 2007-08-31 13:00.

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Hash: SHA1

Haines Brown wrote:
> I'm runing debian etch, and things worked until recently when I tried
> to reconfigure locales. Somehow I found myself in a position where I
> can't reconfigure locales, and snooping online suggests there's no
> simple solution.

[snip]

> Should I go ahead and have root insert environment variables such as LANGUAGE =
> "en_US.UTF-8" into its environment and then run # dpkg-reconfigure
> locales again?
>

Maybe you could try 'aptitude reinstall locales'. Don't know if this
would work, though. (It can't hurt, I guess ;-)

Johannes

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Locale won't set

Submitted by cspal on Sat, 2007-09-01 02:00.

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 07:07:13PM +0200, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
>
> Haines Brown wrote:
> > I'm runing debian etch, and things worked until recently when I tried
> > to reconfigure locales. Somehow I found myself in a position where I
> > can't reconfigure locales, and snooping online suggests there's no
> > simple solution.

Try this:
http://www.debiantutorials.org/talkitup/index.php?topic=1591.0

--
Regards, Paul Csanyi
http://www.freewebs.com/csanyi-pal/index.htm

Locale won't set

Submitted by Haines Brown on Sat, 2007-09-01 07:00.

I believe I'm getting closer.

I can't reinstall locales because with locales broken, I can't install
any packages. Is it possible to do a package installation without its
calling locales?

Mathias' suggestion that I run strace on the locale command did lead
me to stumble on a likely culprit:

$ strace -eopen locale -a
open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/usr/lib/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
...

This -1 error and the others that followed led me to
/usr/lib/locales. I found no no "en_UTF-8" directory there, but to
judge from backups, apparently there shouldn't be. My guess is that
the the values for the locales variables are looked up in the
locale-archive binary file found there.

I did discover that my last four system backups had a
/usr/lib/locale/local-archive file that was about 1.21 Mb in size and
had remained the same since I first installed etch in April. However,
a week ago the file suddenly shrank to 320 Kb.

It seemed likely to me that this file was broken at that time, and a
simple fix would be to copy the old version of the locale-archive file
over from the backup. However, given that I don't have any clue how
the locale system works, I'd appreciate a suggestion that a simple
recovery of the original locale-archive file from backup would be
OK and whether there are any other steps I need to take.

Haines Brown, KB1GRM

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