locale hell

[Tom Allison <tallison@tacocat.net>]

I'm trying to install/configure a notebook from the debian-installer and 
testing/unstable branches.

I've not selected 'tasksel' in the installation process.

Now, every time that I attempt to run apt-get or many other things I get 
hammered with these errors:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LC_CTYPE = "en_US.UTF-8",
        LANG = (unset)
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").


And then I'm left with dozens of broken packages.

I ran into this about two months ago on another box and have no real 
clue what I did to get it working again.  But localedef and locales 
doesn't seem to help anything at all.  My /etc/locale.gen only contains
en_US ISO-8859-1

During the installation of (IIRC) xserver-xfree86 I was asked about 
locales and at the time I selected only the en_UTF8.  I'm not sure about 
this package since installing this generally comes with a groundswell of 
other packages as well.

I'm worried.  I haven't run into a problem that I couldn't eventually 
solve in years and there is nothing under /usr/share/doc/ to provide any 
assistance.