Re: Terminal issues in fresh install

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 03:05:10PM -0500, Peter Smerdon <psmerdon@magma.ca> was heard to say:
> Hi, I too have some issue with UTF-8, although I can install and remove
> software without a problem, my logs get filled with perl warnings about
> locales.

  Which logs?  Terminal output?  ~/.xsession-errors?  /var/log/syslog?

> (peter@thruxton:~)% locale     
> LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
> LC_CTYPE="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_NUMERIC="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_TIME="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_COLLATE="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_MONETARY="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_MESSAGES="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_PAPER="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_NAME="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_ADDRESS="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_TELEPHONE="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_MEASUREMENT="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_CA.UTF-8"
> LC_ALL=
> 
> As you can see LC_ALL is unset, I use rxvt-unicode and can see special
> characters except inside GNU Screen for some reason. How do I set LC_ALL
> the `debian way'?

  I'm not sure setting LC_ALL is your problem; as I understand it,
setting everthing else should be equivalent to setting LC_ALL.  The only
things I can think of off the top of my head are:

  (for the log file thing)
  (1) You're running some sort of apt cronjob, and locales aren't set
      for that.  It looks like they should be set in /etc/default/locale
      by the locales package (run "dpkg-reconfigure locales" to
      regenerate that file), although I'm not quite sure how they get
      pulled into cron's environment.  From crontab(5), it looks like it
      just takes whatever is set in cron's environment.  You could work
      around this by setting them explicitly in /etc/crontab, although
      that's probably papering over some other problem.

  (for screen)
  (2) Somehow your shell startup scripts are zapping the locale in
      screen, but not outside.  I don't know how this would happen, but
      you could check it by running "locale" inside and outside.

  (3) For some reason (e.g., check ~/.screenrc), screen is using the
      wrong encoding.  You could try starting screen with the -U option,
      or by typing "C-a :", then entering "encoding UTF-8" at the prompt.
      See the screen manpage for details.

  Someone who actually knows locales might have a better idea than me.

  Daniel