Ubuntu server locale errors

Friday, October 31, 2008

This is mostly a note to myself... After setting up a minimal Ubuntu server install (in Xen), following these instructions using debootstrap I saw lots of errors like this:

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").

Checking with locale -a would show

C
POSIX

While a full Ubuntu server install (off a CD) would show:

C
en_US.utf8
POSIX

This command seems to have generated the missing locale and made everybody happy.

localedef --no-archive -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8