How to change your default locale on Ubuntu Linux

How to change your default locale on Ubuntu Linux

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