Locale ubuntu error

In case you’re running Ubuntu 18.04 ( or earlier versions as well, such as 16.04, 14.04 ), you may be encountering a locales warning or error while trying to update your package index or installing a package.

As the locales package configuration states:

Locales are a framework to switch between multiple languages and allow users to use their language, country, characters, collation order, etc.

The error looks something like this:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
	LANGUAGE = (unset),
	LC_ALL = (unset),
	LC_MONETARY = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LC_ADDRESS = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LC_TELEPHONE = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LC_NAME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LC_MEASUREMENT = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LC_IDENTIFICATION = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LC_NUMERIC = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LC_PAPER = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

You may encounter this error very often on a fresh install of Ubuntu or Debian.

One solution to fix this issue, first run the locale command to list the locales currently defined for your user account.

$ locale

The output will look something like this:

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

To generate the missing locale and reconfigure locales, identify the name of your locale ( in my case de_DE.UTF-8), or use one another one that you prefer, such as en_US.UTF-8.

Then generate it using the following command:

$ sudo locale-gen "de_US.UTF-8"

And you’ll get the output:

Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  de_DE.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

After which, reconfigure locales using the following command:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

And you’ll receive the output:

Generating locales...
  de_DE.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.

And now you shouldn’t receive any more errors!

If you’ve encountered any issues with this short tutorial, please feel free to let us know in the comments or by contacting us via our social media channels, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

After updating from ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 I receive the following warning: error found when loading /etc/profile cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale. The warning message also lists LC_MESSAGES and LC_ALL as having the same problem.

Here is my /etc/profile

# /etc/profile: system-wide .profile file for the Bourne shell (sh(1))
# and Bourne compatible shells (bash(1), ksh(1), ash(1), ...).

if [ "${PS1-}" ]; then
  if [ "${BASH-}" ] && [ "$BASH" != "/bin/sh" ]; then
    # The file bash.bashrc already sets the default PS1.
    # PS1='h:w$ '
    if [ -f /etc/bash.bashrc ]; then
      . /etc/bash.bashrc
    fi
  else
    if [ "`id -u`" -eq 0 ]; then
      PS1='# '
    else
      PS1='$ '
    fi
  fi
fi

if [ -d /etc/profile.d ]; then
  for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh; do
    if [ -r $i ]; then
      . $i
    fi
  done
  unset i
fi

when I tried ran sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales, it returns…

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = "en_US.UTI-8",
        LC_CTYPE = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
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
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
locales-all installed, skipping locales generation
*** update-locale: Error: invalid locale settings:  LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_ALL="en_US.UTI-8" LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"

I tried the following:

sudo locale-gen 
[sudo] password for go: 
/bin/bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_AG.UTF-8... done
  en_AU.UTF-8... done
  en_BW.UTF-8... done
  en_CA.UTF-8... done
  en_DK.UTF-8... done
  en_GB.UTF-8... done
  en_HK.UTF-8... done
  en_IE.UTF-8... done
  en_IL.UTF-8... done
  en_IN.UTF-8... done
  en_NG.UTF-8... done
  en_NZ.UTF-8... done
  en_PH.UTF-8... done
  en_SG.UTF-8... done
  en_US.UTF-8... done
  en_ZA.UTF-8... done
  en_ZM.UTF-8... done
  en_ZW.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
go@go-Aspire-TC-705:~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
locales-all installed, skipping locales generation
*** update-locale: Error: invalid locale settings:  LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" LC_ALL="en_US.UTI-8"

I now can run a program that required locale, but the update-locale complains about invalid locale settings.

I’m over my head here. Please help.

If you aren’t using the default locale on your Debian based system, you’ll often run into errors when running things on the command line such as apt-get or Perl. Fixing this is luckily rather trivial.

First of all to verify you have a locale issue, look for warnings or even errors looking like this:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed or 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),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = "en_US"
    are supported and installed on your system.
 .
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

To fix this issue, following questions need to be answered:

1. Is locales installed?
2. Which locales are necessary?
3. Which locales are available?
4. How to generate the necessary locales?

Is “locales” installed?

Run the following command:

sudo apt install locales

Either it will tell you locales is installed already, or it’ll install locales for you. Both are pretty good outcomes.

Which locales are necessary?

To see which locales are required on your system, run the following command:

sudo locale

You’ll want to look for any locales that are not en_US as this is usually default. For example if it mentions de_DE.UTF-8, take note of this. 

Which locales are available?

Run the following command:

sudo locale -a | grep de_DE

Change the “de_DE” to whichever locale your system requires (see previous step). If you’re having a problem with this locale, chances are the output will be empty. To fix this, go to the next step.

How to generate the necessary locales?

This is dependent on your user, if you do not have root permissions (which is unlikely, as the previous steps required sudo) you’ll want to use locale-gen, if you do have root access use dpkg-reconfigure locales. 

In case of dpkg-reconfigure, run:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Use the arrow keys to navigate this menu and spacebar to select the required locales. Don’t forget to set en_US.UTF-8 as your default on the next menu!

In case of locale-gen run:

locale-gen de_DE.UTF-8

At the end of this, simply log out and back in again, there should be no errors left on your console.