Comment 0 for bug 882308

When booting an oneiric ISO, if you interrupt the initial isolinux/syslinux menu, you can select a language. Selecting simplified chinese adds locale=zh_CN to the kernel command line of the boot option you select.

Selecting the second option (install ubuntu) gives the appearance that the installer has preselected simplified chinese for the language. If you don't make any changes on the language screen, later on in the installer you will find several areas that are not showing translations.

Additionally (and arguably worse), the resultant install has parts of the OS that can't don't render properly such as the date and time indicator. Corrupted text is displayed instead.

Observing /etc/default/locale from an install like this, you'll see that LANG is filled out with zh_CN rather than zh_CN.UTF-8.

$ cat /etc/default/locale
LANG="zh_CN"
LANGUAGE="zh_CN:"
LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.UTF-8"

If you perform an install without making any selections in that isolinux/syslinux menu, but instead choose simplified chinese in the first language screen, /etc/default/locale will look like this:

$ cat /etc/default/locale
LANG="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="zh_CN:zh"
LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.UTF-8"

The logs attached to this bug are from a system that was installed with the simplified chinese selected in the isolinux/syslinux menu.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: ubiquity (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Oct 27 10:18:56 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release amd64 (20111012)
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)