mucked-up locale settings in testing
OK, it seems the time has come for me to confront one of those topics I've
never bothered with: locales. The reason is that it seems I have some
fouled up locale settings (I don't know how) and that this is preventing
my system from updating.
The system is an all-testing one, on a Dell laptop (Inspiron 4100). I have
five other operating systems functioning ok-to-great on this box. Also,
FWIW I am back using Debian after a few years' absence.
In my use of aptitude over the past couple of weeks, it downloads packages
and then kicks out for the install, and I get a number of occurrences
of this:
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en_US:en_GB:en",
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
Obviously, LC_ALL needs to be set and isn't ...
... then more badness sets in with this:
Preparing to replace kdemultimedia-kio-plugins 4:3.3.2-1 (using
.../kdemultimedia-kio-plugins_4%3a3.5.1-1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement kdemultimedia-kio-plugins ...
dpkg: error processing
/var/cache/apt/archives/kdemultimedia-kio-plugins_4%3a3.5.1-1_i386.deb
(--unpack):
trying to overwrite
`/usr/share/doc/kde/HTML/en/kioslave/audiocd.docbook', which is also in
package kdebase-kio-plugins
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/kdemultimedia-kio-plugins_4%3a3.5.1-1_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
... which is immediately followed by a number of occurrences of this:
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of kget:
kget depends on kdelibs4c2a (>= 4:3.5.1-1); however:
Package kdelibs4c2a is not installed.
kget depends on libqt3-mt (>= 3:3.3.5); however:
Package libqt3-mt is not installed.
... and then a long list of KDE packages that could not be installed. Now,
when this first happened I thought "ah, it's testing and it will
eventually clear up," but this hasn't happened. Plus, most of the stuff
above has the appearance -- to me anyway -- of an error cascade, with the
locale stuff as the first snowflake in the avalanche.
I've tried locale-setting commands from Debian Reference, but I seem to be
caught with them in a kind of Catch-22 where I can't set the locale
because the locale isn't set correctly. I suspect this is a simple problem
to fix (even though I don't know how it arose) ... can anyone help me
here?
Let me know if more details are necessary and I will provide them - and
apologies for the length of this message.
Regards,
Glenn Becker
+-----------------------------------------------------+
burningc@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
+-----------------------------------------------------+
Reply to: