login only offers japanese environment

[Rolf Leggewie]

After upgrading from precise to trusty lightdm only offers to log in to a Japanese environment now (lightdm login screen, the pulldown only has "ja" on offer). I looked around but could not spot why this would be.

$ sudo rgrep -i ja_JP /etc/
Binary file /etc/.git/index matches
/etc/scim/config:/Hotkeys/FrontEnd/Trigger/ja_JP = Zenkaku_Hankaku,Alt+grave,Control+space
/etc/.etckeeper:maybe chmod 0755 './X11/ja_JP.UTF-8'
/etc/.etckeeper:maybe chmod 0755 './X11/ja_JP.UTF-8/app-defaults'
/etc/.etckeeper:maybe chmod 0644 './X11/ja_JP.UTF-8/app-defaults/TiMidity'
/etc/.etckeeper:maybe chmod 0755 './X11/ja_JP.eucJP'
/etc/.etckeeper:maybe chmod 0755 './X11/ja_JP.eucJP/app-defaults'
/etc/.etckeeper:maybe chmod 0644 './X11/ja_JP.eucJP/app-defaults/TiMidity'
/etc/locale.alias:japanese ja_JP.eucJP
/etc/locale.alias:japanese.euc ja_JP.eucJP
/etc/locale.alias:ja_JP ja_JP.eucJP
/etc/locale.alias:ja_JP.ujis ja_JP.eucJP
/etc/locale.alias:japanese.sjis ja_JP.SJIS
/etc/wwwoffle/namazu/namazurc:## Lang: Set the locale code such as `ja_JP.eucJP', `ja_JP.SJIS',
/etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default:# Japanese ja_JP* kinput2 "@im=kinput2" Shift-Space

$ ll /etc/X11/
total 92
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Mar 2 2010 X -> /usr/bin/Xorg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 709 Apr 1 2010 Xreset
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 22 20:57 Xreset.d
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 22 20:57 Xresources
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3730 Feb 19 2010 Xsession
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 23 14:07 Xsession.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 265 Feb 19 2010 Xsession.options
-rw------- 1 root root 601 Mar 2 2010 Xwrapper.config
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 23 14:41 app-defaults
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 19 2012 cursors
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18 Dec 24 01:06 default-display-manager
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 23 14:41 fluxbox
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Mar 3 2010 fonts
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 23 14:45 ja_JP.UTF-8
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 23 14:45 ja_JP.eucJP
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 Mar 3 2010 openbox -> ../xdg/openbox
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17394 Feb 19 2010 rgb.txt
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 23 01:41 xinit
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 5 23:01 xkb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 270 Feb 1 11:05 xorg.conf.failsafe
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 22 20:57 xsm

$ cat /etc/environment
PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games"
LC_MESSAGES="C"

I thought that maybe this behaviour is due to the ja_JP folders inside /etc/X11 and those belong to timidity.

$ dpkg -S /etc/X11/ja_JP.*
timidity: /etc/X11/ja_JP.UTF-8
timidity: /etc/X11/ja_JP.eucJP

The strange (and upsetting) thing is that this even overrides an explicit setting I have made.

$ cat ~/.environment
#LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C"

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Can you please take these steps and let us know the result:

* Remove the LC_MESSAGES line from /etc/environment
* Remove the ~/.environment file
* Go to System Settings -> Language Support and check which languages are installed
* Use the Language Support interface to set the desired language

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Thank you for having a look. I had already looked into the situation a little further and noticed this might have to do with the installed language packs. I noticed that I only had the Japanese language packs installed (this is on purpose). My settings in /etc/environment and ~/.environment have also been purposefully made to reflect a "German settings for everything but English menus" with locales. I have deinstalled the japanese language packs temporarily and now the only entry I get in the greeter is "en". But that is not much better since now my whole environment is English.

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=C
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

There is no language support icon under system settings here but from what I remember from it in the past I believe it might not be fine-grained enough for what I want to achieve which is a MIXED environment. In any case, I prefer to know what config files to touch than relying solely on click-and-point configuration management.

I hope this sufficiently answers your questions.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I think I understand.

As I suspected, ~/.environment is not sourced. If it was, LANG would be de_DE.UTF-8 when you run the locale command, right? The user specific equivalent to /etc/environment is ~/.pam_environment.

Saw at bug #1296230 that the Language Support icon is missing for you too. That has to be fixed, of course.

The options in the language chooser on the login screen reflect the installed translations (with "en" as the exception), so I don't really understand how this would be a bug, so I convert this bug report to a question.