Wrong default locale

By Mikael Asp Somkane, 28 June 2019 in Linux tags: locale

After installing Manjaro, a Linux distribution based on Arch, I decided to give Khal a chance. Khal is a terminal based calendar, but it kept complaining about not being able to set my default locale. I couldn’t even write the Swedish characters åäö. There are usually lots and lots of information on the Arch website and after reading that and a bunch of forum posts and trying this and that it still didn’t work.

KDE has a tool to set the locale and it looked correct, but still wrong.

The command locale will show you the locale, obviously :)

mikael ~ $ locale
LANG=en_SE.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

As you can see it’s a mix of en_US.UTF-8 and sv_SE.UTF-8 depending on if it’s language or format. At the first I thought that the problem was LANG since it is set to en_SE.UTF-8 which seems to be a mix of English and Swedish in the same locale. I prefer my system to be in English because it’s much easier to search for a solution if the error messages are in English, but I still want to have Swedish formats for numbers, currency, time and so on.

Next I checked what locales was installed:

mikael ~ $ locale -a
C
en_US.utf8
POSIX
sv_SE.utf8

That looks correct too. Both Swedish and English are installed. But if your language is missing you open the file /etc/locale.gen and remove the # starting the line of your language like this:

#en_SG.UTF-8 UTF-8  
#en_SG ISO-8859-1  
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
#en_US ISO-8859-1  
#en_ZA.UTF-8 UTF-8  

As you can see the # is removed from en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8. Next you run the program locale-gen to generate the locale files.

Next I checked the /etc/locale.conf file.

mikael ~ $ cat /etc/locale.conf 
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=sv_SE.UTF-8

And this is where things got interesting. This file is correct now, but LC_CTYPE, LC_COLLATE and LC_MESSAGES was missing in my file. So I added them to the file and restarted the computer and it worked. I don’t know why those lines where missing since I set them in KDE’s own locale program. Anyway, it works and I can use Khal to manage my calendar. Later I will tell you how I sync that calendar with the calendar on my phone.

Update

Here I write how to sync Khal with Android.