Changing language not possible

[Osmo Laitinen]

After upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 system language got messed up.

In 9.10 everybody else was using Finnish but me. I used English.

After upgrade to 10.04, my language was changed to Finnish (didn't check others).

Played a while with language settings (system -> administration -> language setting) and after making
English system wide, I managed to get English as my language: great!

At this point everybody else were switched to English as well, maybe because my system wide setting change.

I was able to switch only 1 user back to Finnish again: very strange.
Everybody else had English at the top of language selector after the change to Finnish and relogin.

Checked their ~/.dmrc and those seemed to be correct.

Then I found out that everybody else was lacking .profile file, but not the one for whom the language change worked.
Copied .profile file for rest and Finnish language was changed for them.

I wouldn't call this very user friendly method for changing language.

And maybe you want to call this as feature request, but for me this was very annoying bug. :)

[Arne Goetje (arnegoetje)]

Thanks for your bug report. In order to be able to reproduce this issue, we would need to know a bit more about your 9.10 setup from which you upgraded to 10.04.

So, if you remember, it would be great if you could answer the following questions:

1. In which language did you install the 9.10 system? English or Finnish?
2. How did you set your own language preferences (system language, user language)?
3. Which language was GDM (the login screen) shown in? English or Finnish?
4. Which language was chosen as user language in the login screen? English or Finnish?
5. How did you set up the additional user accounts (I'm wondering why they didn't have a .profile in their home directories)?
6. What did the other users do to set their desktop language? Did they just use the system defaults (if Finnish)? Did they use language-selector or did they choose their language in the login screen?

Without this information I'm afraid I need to close this bug, since I won't be able to reproduce it reliably.

[Osmo Laitinen (osmo-laitinen)]

Sorry, but I may not remember correctly these but I assume some of them:

1. English
2. I probably didn't change anything
3. Probably Finnish
4. Probably Finnish
5. Probably via GUI, although some might have been added by useradd.
6. System default was (and is English). I think all Finnish users has first chosen language at login screen and may have probably used language-selector as well.

So, most of this information is guessing and might thus be unusable.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

An extensive code reorganization has been made after the Lucid release, and the current code should create ~/.profile if it does not exist. Even other changes are about to be committed:
https://launchpad.net/~gunnarhj/+archive/locale-test
They probably affect the behavior you describe.

Could you please check the behavior in Maverick (or Natty), and let us know if the bug is still valid?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Andrei,
Changing the status from "Incomplete" should better be accompanied with further info. Please share any useful info you may have about this bug and how it can be reproduced. In the meantime "Incomplete" seems to be the proper status, so I changed it back.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for language-selector (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]