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I installed Debian 9.6 with english as the language, and locale settings (incl. keyboard) as finnish. All works fine in desktop apps e.g. Chromium, but the keys "ä", "ö" and "å" don't work in Konsole, xterm, uxterm or rxvt. Otherwise, the keymap works as it should.

In xterm, uxterm and rxvt, these keys just do nothing. In Konsole, "ö" key gives me an "(arg: 6) " prompt.

That is, if I start them from the KDE menu. If I start xterm (or Konsole) from Konsole, the keys work. Likewise if I do "su" in any of the terminal emulators.

This doesn't seem to depend on the environmental variables I get by running locale. The output is initially as follows:

jonni@jlehtira:~$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=sms_FI.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="sms_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

If I do su jonni, then I see

jonni@jlehtira:~$ locale
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=

However, just copy-pasting these environment variables to a newly-opened shell doesn't change anything. Also I wonder where the heck did sms_FI come from anyway.

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  • Welcome , recompile the locale file localedef -f UTF-8 -i fi_FI ./fi_FI.UTF-8
    – GAD3R
    Jan 16, 2019 at 10:16
  • Thank you, GAD3R! Do you mean in directory /usr/share/i18n/locales/ ? I have similar old files from Debian Jessie that worked perfectly, and seem mostly quite similar to what I have, but I suppose that's worth trying. Jan 16, 2019 at 10:37

1 Answer 1

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It seems the creation of locales during installation may have been skipped.

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Choose one or more locales to generate for your computer, and then select the one that should be the system default.

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  • I just ran that command as root, selecting en_US.UTF-8 and fi_FI.UTF-8, selecting en_US as default. Then I rebooted the computer. The problem persists without change. Jan 16, 2019 at 10:07

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