Can't switch UI language for single users, only system-wide

[Michael Satke]

The title says it all ... I tried to switch the language of the user interface to English instead of German for a single user, which did not work. Applying the new language system-wide did the job, but forced all other users on that pc to have their graphical sessions in the new language too.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: gnome-control-center 1:3.28.1-0ubuntu1.18.04.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-23.25-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-23-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Jun 22 14:56:26 2018
SourcePackage: gnome-control-center
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-05-29 (23 days ago)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

I assume it was the Language Support tool you used. How did it "not work"? You need to relogin before the new display language gets effective.

[Michael Satke (n9447354)]

Gunnar, of course i logged out and in. Reboots did not help either.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Hmm.. That's a mystery.

Can you please run the following commands and show the complete output in a comment here:

locale

cat /etc/default/locale

cat ~/.pam_environment

Also, can you recall that you have configured languages/locales manually somehow?

[Michael Satke (n9447354)]

Gunnar, thank you for your help. Here are my results:
__________________________________________

locale

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=de:en
LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.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=
__________________________________________

cat /etc/default/locale

LANG="de_AT.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="de_AT:de"

__________________________________________

cat ~/.pam_environment

LANGUAGE DEFAULT=en
LANG DEFAULT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.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
PAPERSIZE=a4
__________________________________________

I did not do any manual language configuring.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

/etc/default/locale and ~/.pam_environment are the only files which are written to via the GUIs, and both of them look normal to me. The locale output, however, is not consistent with those files. With that ~/.pam_environment file it ought to look like this:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=de_DE.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=

So the variables set by ~/.pam_environment seem to be overridden somehow by settings somewhere else. Actually, I see in the attached ProcEnviron.txt file that every single locale category has been set explicitly (to German) - also variables which are not set by any of those two files such as LC_CTYPE and LC_MESSAGES.

More questions:

Are you possibly accessing the PC remotely from some other machine via SSH or something?

What's the output from these commands:

  dpkg-query -W gdm3

  cat /etc/environment

[Michael Satke (n9447354)]

Overrides: That is interesting. I ssh-ed frequently until about a year ago (from machines inside my WIFI), but not recently.
_________________________________________________

dpkg-query -W gdm3

gdm3 3.28.2-0ubuntu1.2
_________________________________________________

cat /etc/environment

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games"

_________________________________________________

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Unfortunately I can't make sense of the information you have provided so far. The locale configuration is screwed up somehow, but none of the two files where such configuration is normally saved seems to be involved. You reported that "Apply System-Wide" makes a difference, and that precludes quite a few candidate files.

I don't know how to reproduce the behavior you describe, and so far I see no confirmed bug in any of the packages which are involved in language/locale settings. Can you add anything else to shed some light on it?

Possibly you simply need help with cleaning up the configuration of your system, and then some support forum such as <https://askubuntu.com> is the place to go.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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