Debian Jessie with Xfce: cannot change locale (LANG) after installing new locale

Question

I am running Debian Jessie with xfce.

I used to have the system in English (en_US.utf8 as LANG since I installed debian only with English).

Lately, I installed new locales and even if I made sure I chose None for the default locale, as advised on the wiki, I noticed that one of the installed locale, German is now set (LANG=de_DE.utf8 when I run locale).

I followed the instructions on the other wiki about changing the locale, ie.

# export=en_US.utf8

and then

dpkg-reconfigure locales

and then restarting.

But I still get LANG=de_DE.utf8 and de_DE.utf8 for all the LC_* variables (LANGUAGE is set to English though).

I even removed the German local, rerun the export and dpkg-reconfigure locales and restarted but I still have LANG=de_DE.utf8.

What am I missing here?

Could it come from xfce session and startup settings? I looked a bit there but I'm not sure if I might not break other stuff by playing around with those settings.

Answer 1

you are using a wrong order:

export=en_US.utf-8

this should be:

export LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8

or:

export LANG=en_US.utf-8

Anyway, as the Debian wiki says, the use of LC_ALL is discouraged as it only lasts while session (i.e: an open terminal session). You could add it to a startup script, but this is discouraged again by Debian's wiki.

If you just want to change your locale definitely, you must add your desired locale to /etc/locale.gen. After that, run:

locale-gen

and after that, verify the recently generated locale with:

locale -a

en_US.utf-8 should appear as an output of that order.

Good luck!