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Using system settings I changed my language to Arabic and deleted the English language from the settings. Then the computer lagged and it logged out - now I can't log back in because the login is in Arabic.

So is there a way to default my language via terminal, default the login password language, or login via terminal which is still in English. I only have access to guest and a terminal.

I changed the pasword to something that could be translated into arabic http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/resetpassword - then loged in and used system settings to default.

Luis Alvarado
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McGee
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3 Answers3

61

Edit two files:

  1. sudoedit /etc/default/locale:

    LANG="en_US"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"

  2. sudoedit ~/.pam_environment:

    LANG=en_US
LANGUAGE=en_US

Logout and Login or Reboot.

Zanna
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harisibrahimkv
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    Nano is also installed by default. :-) – LiveWireBT May 07 '12 at 17:29
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    If you want to understand what changing these variables means: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Locale – yuric Apr 29 '13 at 17:25
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    Also need LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 – Artem P Jan 19 '16 at 00:28
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    If using KDE, you might want to check ~/.KDE/env/setlocale.sh too, as it might conflict. – stragu Jun 22 '16 at 04:15
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    This also works for "Bash on Ubuntu" on Windows 10. –  Oct 18 '16 at 06:46
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    @hlcs You shouldn't set LC_ALL in /etc/default/local, and definitely shouldn't need it. LC_ALL prevents you from using fine grained control of LC_* vars. Users / apps would need to unset LC_ALL to do this. On the other hand LANG sets the defaults for all the LC_* vars that have not been set explicitly. If LANG is not working for you then you need to trace through your profile and find out what is overriding it. – Philip Couling Jun 01 '17 at 15:41
  • @couling - After NOT setting LC_ALL, I got these errors: https://pastebin.com/AgerQC7q -- On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS - and while using apt to dist-upgrade. – Apache Aug 18 '17 at 07:30
  • @Shiki If LANG is not working for you then you need to trace through your profile and find out what is overriding it. But looking at your error you may need too look at this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2499794/how-to-fix-a-locale-setting-warning-from-perl – Philip Couling Aug 18 '17 at 09:35
  • Works like a charm on Raspbian too (sudo raspi-config just caused more problems than good) – Zoe is on strike Jan 20 '19 at 15:29
5

In order to get back to English, I had to change my locale in 3 places:

  1. /etc/default/locale

    by running this command:

    $ sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE= LC_MESSAGES= LC_COLLATE= LC_CTYPE=

  2. ~/.config/plasma-localerc and ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh

    By going to my KDE settings / Regional Settings / Language

And reboot.

kolypto
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1

You can also do this interactively using dpkg-reconfigure:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locale

and follow the steps on the next screens.

After that, logout/login again and/or reboot.

s.k
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