When upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 with German locale to 10.04 LTS, you might encounter a situation where most system messages appear in English but critical components like apt-get stubbornly remain in the original language. This creates functional issues like swapped confirmation prompts (J/N instead of Y/N).

Here's the definitive solution to achieve full English localization:

# First, generate the en_US locale if not present
sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

# Verify available locales
locale -a | grep en_US

# Edit the main locale configuration
sudo nano /etc/default/locale

Set these contents in /etc/default/locale:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

APT maintains its own configuration. Create or modify:

sudo nano /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99translations

Add this line to force English:

Acquire::Languages "none";

Update /etc/environment with:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"

Run these commands to apply changes:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
sudo update-locale LANGUAGE=en_US:en

Reboot the server to ensure all services pick up the new settings:

sudo reboot

After reboot, verify with:

locale
# Should show en_US.UTF-8 for all categories

If any service still shows German output, check its specific configuration files for locale overrides.

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After upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 (German) to 10.04 LTS, you might notice that while most system messages appear in English, some core utilities like apt-get still display output in German. This happens because locale settings are stored in multiple configuration files.

There are three main files controlling locale settings:

/etc/default/locale
/etc/environment
/var/lib/locales/supported.d/local

Here's the proper way to change the system locale completely:

# First, install English locale packages
sudo apt-get install language-pack-en-base

# Generate the new locale
sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

# Update the default locale configuration
sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_US:en

# Alternatively, you can edit /etc/default/locale directly:
sudo nano /etc/default/locale

Set the content to:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

After making these changes, log out and log back in, then verify with:

locale

You should see output like:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

If some messages still appear in German, try:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

Select en_US.UTF-8 as the default locale during the configuration.

For a more thorough solution, you can:

# Remove all existing locale settings
sudo apt-get purge locales

# Reinstall locales package
sudo apt-get install locales

# Generate only the English locale
sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

# Set as system default
sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

• Changes won't take effect until you log out and log back in
• Some services may need to be restarted
• Check individual application settings if they maintain their own locale preferences