How to change your default locale on Ubuntu Linux

转自：http://blog.andrewbeacock.com/2007/01/how-to-change-your-default-locale-on.htm

One problem that has repeatedly cropped up when developing in Java is strange error messages in our unit tests for certain text manipulation
tests when running on a freshly installed Ubuntu desktop.

They are all related to Ubuntu's default British locale:

en_GB.UTF-8

This was causing files checked out of CVS to be in Unicode (UTF-8) format rather than ISO-8859-1 and so the British pound sign (£) was being encoded as a double-byte (rather than single-byte)
character in the file.

To check which locale you currently have as your default just run:

locale

Changing the default locale is a little different on Ubuntu compared to most Linux distros, these are the steps we needed to go through to get it changed:

Add the locale to the list of 'supported locales'

Edit

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

and add the following line:

en_GB ISO-8859-1

Regenerate the supported locales

Run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Change the default locale

Edit

/etc/environment

and ensure the

LANG

and

LANGUAGE

lines read as follows:

LANG="en_GB"

LANGUAGE="en_GB:en"

UPDATE '09: An old collegue has suggested that this change should now be made in

/etc/default/locale

rather than

/etc/environment

- Thanks Guy!

Reboot!

Rerun

locale

to check that your default locale is now

en_GB