Fix Problem “Failed to set locale, defaulting to C.UTF-8 ” in CentOS 8 /RHEL 8

Introduction

This article describes how to fix this warning “Failed to set locale, defaulting to C.UTF-8” in CentOS 8 /RHEL 8 .

A locale is a set of basic system parameters that define:

• Language

• Region

• Variant preferences

Note: On Linux , locale identifiers are defined by ISO/IEC 15897.

For example: United state of america (US) English using the UTF-8 encoding is en_US.UTF-8.

Fixing The Problem

• Set system locale, use the localectl command. run the following command for english united state

localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

• Verify if the system locale has been set or not with localectl command.

[root@unixcop ~]# localectl 
   System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
       VC Keymap: us
      X11 Layout: us
[root@unixcop ~]#

• Try to install a package

For example installing mysql service

As shown above, the warning still existed. because the language packages are missing.

• Install all language packages by the glibc-all-langpacks package that contains all locales.

dnf install -y glibc-all-langpacks langpacks-en

Note: To install locale individually, run the following command by replacing en with the locale-code you want.

Example to install french locale with its code fr :

dnf install glibc-langpack-fr

Conclusion

That’s all

We illustrated how to fix the error “Failed to set locale, defaulting to C.UTF-8” in CentOS 8 or RHEL 8.