[Solved] Can't find what messes up my locales

Question

Hi,
First of all, I'd like to say that I did follow the beginner's guide and the locale wiki entry before posting here. I spents many hours trying to correct the issue myself but I can't think of anything but ugly fixes now...
Please note that I've done a few adjustments after the initial installation to try and fix my locale. For example, my /etc/locale.conf initially didn't include anything else than LANG and LC_COLLATE, but I've added other options to try and fix them (no success).
The global locale that I want to use is en_CA.UTF-8. I've enabled it in /etc/locale.gen and generated it with locale-gen, and here's the output of:
$ locale -a
C
POSIX
en_CA.utf8
Here's my locale.conf:
$ cat locale.conf
LANG="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="C"
# Added afterwards
LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.UTF-8"
I've also copied this /etc/locale.conf to ~/.config/locale.conf, but nothing changed. I looked at /etc/profile.d/locale.sh to see what other script might change my locales after startup but I couldn't find anything else. Here's what I get when I run "locale" in bash:
$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=fr_CA.utf8
LC_TIME=fr_CA.utf8
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY=fr_CA.utf8
LC_MESSAGES=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=fr_CA.utf8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_ALL=
So the problem is that a few locales are set to fr_CA.ut8, which isn't enabled and doesn't even correspond to the locale.gen entry (it would've to be fr_CA.UTF-8). Several applications report that they cannot find the locale so I'd really like to correct that. Also several characters fail to show up correctly in bash (man pages, htop, bash itself, etc.). For example:
$ man locale
man: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct
I have no rc.conf or rc.local in /etc. There also isn't anything in /etc/bash.bashrc or ~/.bashrc regarding locales, and I don't see what else could affect it. /etc/profile doesn't, I don't have any ~/.profile... I'm quite lost.
I've also tried going back to the base configuration shown in the beginner's guide, so no ~/.config/locale.conf and only LANG and LC_COLLATE in /etc/locale.conf, but I get the same results.
I know I could export these values in other startup scripts but it seems like an ugly fix to me and I'd like to correct the problem at its root. I don't believe there's any relevant log file. Could you please help me fix this?
Thank you,
Last edited by miek (2013-01-01 01:02:29)

Answer 1

OK... out of ideas
My setup has always included that file followed by `locale-gen` as well as setting up /etc/locale.conf as you have.
% cat /etc/locale.conf
LANG=en_US.utf8
LC_COLLATE=C
% sed '/#/d' /etc/locale.gen
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
Last edited by graysky (2012-12-31 18:20:29)