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