warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale

I want to switch to French locale. So I tried the below command:

myUbundu@myUbundu-desktop:~$ export LC_ALL=fr_FR

But I am getting the warning

-bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (fr_FR)

How to set the locale to French? Do I need to install additional packages?

Solution 1:

Try the following commands

sudo locale-gen fr_FR
sudo update-locale LANG=fr_FR

Solution 2:

I've had the same issue, and none of the answers worked, except dpkg-reconfigure locales. But it is too time consuming to do it this way. Just uncomment all the locales you need in /etc/locale.gen and run locale-gen. Or do it from the command line (as root):

echo "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" > /etc/locale.gen
echo "fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen

Solution 3:

I have fought with this for a week or so.

The most reliable (and easiest too) for me was to edit my profile file with

gedit ~/.profile

An add this language variables to be set at every login

LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_AU:en"

You need to log out and back in for the change to take effect.

Solution 4:

Try installing language pack for French, e.g.

sudo apt-get install language-pack-fr

For any other language, run: check-language-support -l CODE to check the supported packages, e.g.

$ check-language-support -l fr
firefox-locale-fr gimp-help-fr hunspell-fr language-pack-fr language-pack-gnome-fr thunderbird-locale-fr wfrench

Check also: LC_ALL: cannot change locale.