Select locales on ubuntu 10.04 after installation

When I activate a new rackspace ubuntu 10.04 instance I keep getting these messages:

perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "de_DE.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system.

How do I select and configure the locales correctly?

Edit: This was given to me by Rackspace support, it also worked, maybe it helps someone with ubuntu 10.04:

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
sudo /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Solution 1:

First check that your desired locale is available on your system:

locale -a

If your locale is not available:

• Find the line with your desired locale in /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
• Copy the whole line to /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
• Regenerate locales using sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Once the locale is made available, enable it by editing /etc/default/locale, e.g.:

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