Background: I run this server through Slicehost, and I enjoy their service immensely. When you set up your first server, or rebuild an existing server you get a very minimal GNU/Linux system installed. For obvious reasons, I like this a lot too.
The problem: Both the first time I built this server, and most recently when I rebuilt it to Jaunty Jackalope, the system locales weren’t configured. I understand why this is done, that it happens doesn’t bother me. That I had a hard time finding out how to properly set my locale frustrated me a little bit.
How do you know if your locales aren’t correctly defined? On my Jaunty Jackalope system I see messages like this:
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
I tried running dpkg-reconfigure locales, but that had no effect. Searching the Internet for the messages above provided a couple of possible solutions, but none of them looked like anything I was interested in. I’m a firm believer that if the Internet tells me to run a command with more than a couple of options, that it may work, but there is probably an easier, less cryptic solution. For example:
localedef -v -c -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8
No way I’m running that. I instead searched for “slicehost locale” and found this article: Ubuntu Hardy setup. I enjoy this much more:
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
Turns out that update-locale is a Debian/Ubuntu specific command. It update your systems default locale setting file. I had checked for one before running it and found that none existed yet on my system. After running those two commands above I found one had been created with “LANG=en_US.UTF-8″ in it. It’s possible that running update-locale could have been all I needed to do to begin with.
I hope this helps some one else whose had this problem before or for the first time.