[Solved] Cannot set locale (at first)

Question

I don't think this is due to some trivial mistake (but then again, I've been wrong before). Anyway, I moved my system to systemd, and in /etc/locale.conf I have the following:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=C
In /etc/locale.gen I have the following locales selected:
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US ISO-8859-1
pt_PT.UTF-8 UTF-8
pt_PT ISO-8859-1
pt_PT@euro ISO-8859-15
When running locale-gen, I get the following output:
Generating locales...
en_US.UTF-8... done
en_US.ISO-8859-1... done
pt_PT.UTF-8... done
pt_PT.ISO-8859-1... done
pt_PT.ISO-8859-15@euro... done
Generation complete.
However, after rebooting (I boot to console, no display manager), and logging in console, the locale that is set is POSIX! I start X with the following command (aliased in .bashrc):
. /etc/locale.conf ; export LANG ; exec nohup startx > /dev/null &vlock
And after doing that, the locale, both in X and in console, is set to the correct one! (en_US.UTF-8)
Am I making a newbie mistake somewhere?
Last edited by gauthma (2013-05-16 19:31:28)

Answer 1

Just a 2 cent coin from me -- maybe it helps someone...
After the filesystem upgrade, the /etc/profile.d/locale.sh file disappeared from my hdd (nothing fishy here: sometimes odd things happen and it's enough to re-run update to fix them). Before I realized that, I lost my default locales (en_US.UTF-8) and after issuing 'locale', I got the same output as the OP ("POSIX" from top to bottom). I was trying to use $HOME/.config/locale.conf file, but nothing expected ever happened, and the only way to make things work my way was to export LANG="en_US.UTF-8" in good old $HOME/.profile. When I eventually updated the filesystem correctly and /etc/profile.d/locale.sh was brought back, I realized that $HOME/.config/locale.conf won't work without it as this is where the relevant variable is set:
if [ -n "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" ] && [ -r "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/locale.conf" ]; then
. "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/locale.conf"
elif [ -n $HOME ] && [ -r $HOME/.config/locale.conf ]; then
. "$HOME/.config/locale.conf"
elif [ -r /etc/locale.conf ]; then
. /etc/locale.conf
elif [ -r /etc/rc.conf ]; then
LANG=$(. /etc/rc.conf 2>/dev/null; echo "$LOCALE")
fi
Ergo: if your system hasn't been informed to use $HOME/.config/locale.conf anywhere in a system-wide context, the local file won't work. Simple and logical.
Last edited by bohoomil (2012-08-31 13:04:37)