Fixing “No such file or directory” locale errors

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While working on a new ubuntu karmic system I ran across the following locale error when attempting to perform a dist-upgrade. I was able to reproduce it by running ‘dpkg-reconfigure locales’ thinking that this might fix the error, sadly it did not.

Here’s the error I was seeing:

root@harrowdown:~# dpkg-reconfigure locales
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_US"
    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

If you boil the error message down a bit the problem becomes a bit more clear. It’s trying to say that the “en_US” locale could not be found:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
        LANG = "en_US"

To install the missing “en_US” locale run ‘locale-gen en_US’ which should yeild the following output.

root@harrowdown:~# locale-gen en_US
Generating locales...
  en_US.ISO-8859-1... done
Generation complete.

And as you can see the errors are no longer printed when I call dpkg-reconfigure (or anything else for that matter).

root@harrowdown:~# dpkg-reconfigure locales
Generating locales...
  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_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.ISO-8859-1... up-to-date
  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
  en_ZA.UTF-8... done
  en_ZW.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

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3 Responses to “Fixing “No such file or directory” locale errors”

  1. Kanwar Says:
    January 21st, 2012 at 8:22 am

    Thanks,

    It worked for me

    [Reply]

  2. Mohsin Says:
    March 13th, 2012 at 4:25 am

    It didn’t work for me. On running “locale-gen en_US” I got the messages that your blog post suggest but running “dpkg-reconfigure locales” again gave the same errors:

    root@server:~# dpkg-reconfigure locales
    perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
    perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LANG = “en_IN”
    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
    Generating locales…
    en_US.ISO-8859-1… up-to-date
    Generation complete.

    [Reply]

  3. sixeightzero Says:
    March 20th, 2012 at 11:32 am

    Mohsin,

    Try running an:

    export LANGUAGE=’en_US’

    Worked for me

    [Reply]

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