Resolve the perl warning 'setting locale failed' problem on Ubuntu Linux

A broken pearl (generated by Midjourney). Credit: libre-software.net. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Ubuntu: resolve the “perl: warning: Setting locale failed” problem

Last updated on October 11, 2022

Are you running Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 or 22.04 desktop or server edition, and getting warning or errors when installing software via apt-get or aptitude?

Here is a typical error message:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_TIME = "es_ES.UTF-8",
LC_MONETARY = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_ADDRESS = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_TELEPHONE = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_NAME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_MEASUREMENT = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_IDENTIFICATION = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_NUMERIC = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_PAPER = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

Sometimes, trying to solve the problem using the update-locale or locale commands does not work and generates following error messages:

~ # sudo update-locale
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_PAPER = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_ADDRESS = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_MONETARY = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_NUMERIC = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_TELEPHONE = "en_US.UTF-8",
LC_IDENTIFICATION = "en_US.UTF-8",
LC_MEASUREMENT = "en_US.UTF-8",
LC_TIME = "es_ES.UTF-8",
LC_NAME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LANG = (unset),
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").

or

~ # locale
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=es_ES.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

Solution to the perl locale problem

The solution is to export the missing locales to ~/.bash_profile. The following command is a one-command line:

echo "export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8">>~/.bash_profile

You could also run each command separately:

echo "export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8">>~/.bash_profile

Alternatively, edit ~/.bash_profile “by hand” with nano, vim or a graphical editor like gedit or xed (Linux Mint).

Don’t forget to reboot and check if the new locales are applied with the locale command.

Another solution is to add the locale variables to /etc/environment instead of ~/.bash_profile.

By Johannes Eva, April 2017 – October 2022

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Comments

15 thoughts on “How to install LibreOffice 24.2 on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, MX Linux, Debian…”

  1. Tim

    You may use the official appimage in Libre Office as well. In fact, on Linux Mint 21 you can’t get rid of the default LO as it may lead to dependency issues. Appimage helps.

  2. Pingback: Ubuntu 21.04: Essentials – Linux Sagas

  3. Jonatan Tisnado

    Issuing $ sudo apt-get remove libreoffice-core installs an office core no gui. With or without purging. Yielding this:
    The following packages will be REMOVED:
    libreoffice-base libreoffice-calc libreoffice-core libreoffice-draw libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-gtk3 libreoffice-impress libreoffice-lightproof-ru-ru libreoffice-math libreoffice-nlpsolver libreoffice-report-builder libreoffice-report-builder-bin libreoffice-script-provider-python libreoffice-sdbc-postgresql libreoffice-wiki-publisher python3-uno
    The following NEW packages will be installed:
    libreoffice-core-nogui
    Many thanks for any clarification!

    1. Coruscant

      Right! The correct command for removing completely the stock LibreOffice on Linux is the following:
      sudo apt purge libreoffice-common

      The following command also works but misses some packages:
      sudo apt purge libreoffice*

      Thank you for your comment, I updated the article accordingly.

  4. Cyteck

    NOTE:- I found that Libre Office version 6.3.2.2 is extremely buggy, it has major dependency problems attempting to install on Linux Mint (Tina 19.2). I wasn’t able to resolve these problems so had to revert the install (remove 6.3.2.2-2) and return to previous version 6.3.1 which works fine.

    **Windows 10 (1903) ALSO NOTE that LO 6.3.2.2 installs on W10 but also caused major performance issues and hung my system on reboot. My machine Borked badly so once again had to revert back to LO 6.3.1 which works fine.

  5. Daniels

    Thanks for the Terminal codes. Newbies like me just want it to work and your codes provide the copy and paste necessities for Linux to do its magic.

    (If it can’t be done in Linux (and LibreOffice) its not worth doing)

  6. n1kk

    please help me with this error, newbee here

    root@Anon:~/libreoffice# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice# cd LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb# cd debs
    bash: cd: debs: No such file or directory
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb# cd DEBS
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb/DEBS# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process
    root@Anon:~/libreoffice/LibreOffice_6.0.2.1_Linux_x86_deb/DEBS# sudo dpkg -i *.deb
    dpkg: error: dpkg status database is locked by another process

    1. Coruscant

      The last line says it all: check if you are running another instance of dpkg. In last resort, try to remove dpkg lock file:

      sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock

      Then let dpkg fix itself:
      sudo dpkg --configure -a

      Note that this problem is not per se related to LibreOffice.

  8. Me

    Would be useful to know how to install such alongside the native repository install of LibreOffice – without conflict. Would be useful to be able to choose, say, LibreOffice Writer 5.2, vs just LibreOffice Writer. Migrations / new versions not always working as seamlessly as one might like with files one might already have. It can be very frustrating to have a new version munge (e.g. formatting) of a current document one depends on, and not being able to ‘un-munge’ it.

  10. Kuku Juhi

    Works well. The only problem I had is that the icons were not created. I created them manually by running Writer, Calc and Impress and the using the “Lock to Launcher” option. This is how to run them from the terminal:

    Writer: /opt/libreoffice5.0/program/oosplash –writer
    Calc: /opt/libreoffice5.0/program/oosplash –calc
    Impress: /opt/libreoffice5.0/program/oosplash –impress

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