[gentoo-user] locale issue to clean up

["Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com>]

My Gentoo desktop has had a locale problem for longer than I can
remember. I haven't been able to solve it on my own, but it didn't
seem too important. More a frustration. I switched my profile to the
2008.0 desktop a few days ago. Everything seems to be working but I'm
getting more of these locale-ish messages now so I'd like to figure
out what I've done wrong.

Here's one typical message I might see when running emerge --depclean:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
	LANGUAGE = (unset),
	LC_ALL = "en_US",
	LANG = (unset)
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

The line about falling back to the standard locale "C" is pretty
standard. I also see this in k3b every time I start the program. As I
do a lot of audio work I'd really like to make sure the CDs I burn on
this machine will be acceptable to folks/friends/customers. Here's
what I see in k3b:

<SNIP>
System locale charset is ANSI_X3.4-1968
Your system's locale charset (i.e. the charset used to encode
filenames) is set to ANSI_X3.4-1968. It is highly unlikely that this
has been done intentionally. Most likely the locale is not set at all.
An invalid setting will result in problems when creating data
projects.
Solution: To properly set the locale charset make sure the LC_*
environment variables are set. Normally the distribution setup tools
take care of this.
<SNIP>

   I don't have a clue what's wrong and the Gentoo pages about locale
setup seem to make some assumptions about my understanding of what
this does and how it does it that I'm not living up to so I really
don't know what to provide. I'll start with this and we'll see how it
goes. It seems that possibly I'm supposed to hand edit
/etc/env.d/02locale but in my longish history of running Gentoo (as a
user type) I don't believe I've ever had to edit that so I'm thinking
I must have messed up some other config file somewhere?

Thanks in advance,
Mark

lightning ~ # cat /etc/locale.gen
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
lightning ~ #

lightning ~ # locale
LANG=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
LC_TIME="en_US"
LC_COLLATE="en_US"
LC_MONETARY="en_US"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
LC_PAPER="en_US"
LC_NAME="en_US"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
LC_ALL=
lightning ~ #

lightning ~ # cat /etc/env.d/02locale
LANG=en_US
lightning ~ #