Home > Uncategorized > Change locale to en_GB.ISO-8859-15 (Ubuntu Karmic)

Change locale to en_GB.ISO-8859-15 (Ubuntu Karmic)

So, the default character encoding for the English language is UTF-8. Not good when, say, you run a Java applet in the browser that has a different locale.

That happened to me recently. So here are the steps to change the locale and solve the issue:

locale-gen en_GB.ISO-8859-15

update-locale LANG=en_GB.ISO-8859-15

pico /var/lib/locales/supported.d/en

pico /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

login again and select the new language

I’m not sure if the 2nd step is necessary, though.

When choosing the login language in GDM, you won’t be able to select the character encoding though (not sure why, as in previous versions you could). So for me that meant removing the en_GB.UTF-8 from both the local and en files in supported.d

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  1. Indie
    July 6, 2010 at 5:13 am | #1

    I got an Ubuntu Lucid vmware image that came with the en_US.UTF-8 locale and wanted to change it to use en_GB.UTF-8.

    cat /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

    Does the desired locale exist in there? If not then create it with

    sudo locale-gen en_GB.UTF-8

    It will genetate the locale and update the list of supported locales. Now change the default locale with

    sudo update-locale LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

    It updates the contents of /etc/default/locale. Log out and back in again. You can check that it has taken affect by typing locale

  2. November 7, 2011 at 1:04 pm | #2

    Hi, this entry was useful to solve my problem. I’m using xt5250 to access iSeries box. However, I need to connect with the param map=284, it means I am using a Latin character code. Then I add this scripts:

    #! /bin/bash
    LANG=”es_AR ISO-8859-1″
    export LANG
    xt5250 [target-machine]

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