[SOLVED] After install, programs give errors like "can't set the locale"

[dg1727]

Linux Mint 18.1 Serena XFCE, recent install (/home is pre-existing from an earlier distro).

Same issue as in https://github.com/linuxmint/live-installer/issues/80 (that issue was with Linux Mint Debian Edition).

I selected an English (US) locale and the default 105-key keyboard. I don't remember doing anything out of the ordinary in the installer. This machine is dual-boot with an older Linux distro, no Windows.
Now environment variable LC_ALL is unset, which causes error messages in several programs, such as:

• The nemo-compare extension fails
• The "man" program says can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct

LANG is set to en_US

This issue prevents "pip" from running.

Per viewtopic.php?f=46&t=233956&p=1242073#p1242073 I opened the Languages control panel on Serena.
The buttons for "Language" and "Region" both say en_US. Under "System locale" (next to the button for "Apply System-Wide") it says:

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Language:  English, United States
Region:  No locale defined

Before I click "Apply System-Wide," I'd like to find out why LC_ALL is unset in the first place, so this problem hopefully won't happen at all for future users.

Attempts to help will be appreciated.

Edit: Changed the title. Per comments below, the problem isn't that LC_ALL is unset, but that LANG is set to "en_US" instead of "en_US.UTF-8".

[George99]

Open a terminal and try

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Choose

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[*] en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

No other locale should be marked

Reboot and verify with

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locale

LC_ALL should be unset, that's OK.

[Flemur]

If better methods don't work, you can define it in your ~/.bashrc file

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export LC_ALL="C"

Note: I set everything to "C" to fix a bug in thunar where it sorts filenames incorrectly** (so set it to whatever value you think is correct):

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$ locale
LANG=C
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="C"
...
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=C

**filenames with characters like _ - and such don't sort properly otherwise; just changing "LC_COLLATE" didn't fix it.

[dg1727]

Thanks to both for your replies. As noted,

I'd like to find out why [this issue occurred] in the first place, so this problem hopefully won't happen at all for future users.

Because of George99's statement about LC_ALL, I've changed the title of this posting.

I've filed comment https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... comments/7
As noted in that comment, setting environment variable LANG to en_US.UTF-8 stops the error messages.

I'll be interested to know if there is anything more specific to Linux Mint that I should do about whatever software component may have introduced this error.

[dg1727]

https://github.com/linuxmint/live-installer/issues/80 updated, incl. response from Launchpad.net

[George99]

For curiousity I just installed Mint 18.1 XFCE 32bit in a VM choosing english / english(US) and "New York" as location.

So this is what I got:

VirtualBox_xfce_08_03_2017_16_00_40.png

locale defaults to en_US.UTF-8, not en_US...

[dg1727]

Yes, I've also done similarly and got the same result. The problem followed the existing /home partition.

The cause turned out to be a file called .dmrc in the primary user's home folder:

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[Desktop]
Language=en_US
Langlist=en_US:en
LCMess=en_US.UTF-8
Layout=us
Session=xfce

Deleting that .dmrc file fixed the issue.

Thanks to all for bearing with me on this.