[Users] perl LOCALE issue- and solution

[Michael Klatsky]

Hello all-

I ran into a puzzling issue and found a solution- but I am wondering
what the root cause really was, and whether others have run into this:

After create a VE using the repo provided centos-4-i386-default
template, I entered the VE via ssh. When running perl (any perl
script), I got the message:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = "en_US:en",
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_US"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C")

After doing a bit of hunting on methods to set this, including these pages:
http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/locale/#short
http://perldoc.perl.org/perllocale.html#Permanently-fixing-your-system's-locale-configuration

I started looking closely at glibc-common, as when I did "locale -a" I
got the message that locale directories could not be found.

I checked, and indeed- rpm -q glibc-common reported that the package
was installed. However, after checking some of the files included that
should have existed, I found that the local dirs were not there
(example: /usr/lib/locale/en_US/LC_TIME). So, I grabbed the
glibc-common rpm and did a rpm -ivh --force,  and voila- all was
properly installed.

The purpose of my post is to document this for others who may have run
into this, and t solicit any theories as to why that package was
"phantomly" installed. Significantly, other than the locale issue- the
system was operating properly.

Thanks- and so far quite impressed


-- 


Sincerely,

Michael