installer does not allow the right country/language combination

[André Pirard]

Ubuntu 11.10 beta installation.

 1. What you expected to happen

The same as what happened, but without the inconvenience

 2. What actually happened

Update: seems to affect only Alternate CD (Gnome), LiveCD is OK.

Supposing a foreign person person in Belgium, let's say an American.

Installation starts.
Language choice: what he speaks: English (twice)
Country for time zone, euro, etc. : Belgium

Answer: "There is no locale defined for the combination of language and country..."
"You can now select the locale that will be used ... [a country where English is spoken]"
And our American guy is requested to move to Zimbabwe or some place, e. g. return to US.
Or to install and configure the system in a language he does not understand.

FYI: a computer located in Belgium is perfectly capable of running in English, see:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Setting-the-POSIX-Locale

As a side note, if he chooses Dutch (his neighbour's language) the system answers that the messages may be a mix of Dutch and English !!! Make up your mind ;-)

 3. The minimal series of steps necessary to make it happen, where step 1 is "start the program"
1 start the programs
2 all of the above.

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

This eternal bug had been reported one year ago in hope to be fixed in 12.04 but it seems useless to report bugs.

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

These are screen shots of a 12.04 installation screens with the error message over-lined.
(wonderful those Сони cameras!!!) ;-)

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

As a workaround, it is trivial to change time-zone & locale post-install. So install defaulting to English (US) (or any other English locales of your choice), and then change the necessary time-zone after the installation.

[André Pirard (a.pirard)]

This problem does not affect the graphical installer, so it's brilliantly solved it by removing the text installer ;-)
Not everyone finds sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata and tzselect trivial.
sample ;-) : http://askubuntu.com/questions/33025/locale-settings-are-not-right-how-can-i-reset-them
I'm even getting scolded by certain persons for suggesting commands.

BTW, it's a pity that the whole of a language must be installed (except Chinese?) just for using its locale.
As well as for spell-checking it, for those who don't know how to install just the dictionary and select it.
For example askubuntu. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1624581
Windows can use any locale and spelling despite remaining monolingual ;-)
It can even change details of a locale piece by piece.

I found no status indicating that the problem disappeared because the component disappeared :-)

Thank you.