How to set the locales in a toolbox?

Project Discussion
1

Hi, I would like to be able to set the locale to en_US.UTF-8 in a toolbox running Fedora rawhide.
The toolbox is running in a Kinoite system.
The usual way for mutable OS does not work because localectl does not work:

[X@toolbox ~]$ localectl
System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.
Failed to connect to bus: Host is down

Slackoverflow provides solutions for Docker but not for podman as far as I could find anything.

Perhaps the solution is to use localedef but I don’t know what I am doing…

Thanks for your help!

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2

The most straightforward way is probably that you set the locale environment variables, for example

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

or to make it permanent in the current toolbox container:

echo export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 >> /etc/profile.d/toolbox-locale.sh

(LC_ALL will override all other locale settings, for the full list of more fine grained settings, see man 5 locale)

2 Likes
3

Many thanks, there is progress but it does not yet fully work.

I guess the export should be done in the host OS (in the toolbox it does not work).
That works, but then, then the following command did not work:

[X@fedora ~]$ sudo echo export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 >> /etc/profile.d/toolbox-locale.sh
bash: /etc/profile.d/toolbox-locale.sh: Permission denied

So I tried to directly create the file manually:

sudo nano /etc/profile.d/toolbox-locale.sh

and pasted in there export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8.

That did work.

Then I restarted the toolbox:

podman restart NAMEOFTOOLBOX

So now we have:

[X@toolbox ~]$ 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=en_US.UTF-8
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=

which seems to contain issues and indeed makes the software I use still unhappy.

Any ideas?

4

If you just want to modify the locale inside the toolbox, I’d expect that both that export command and editing the profile file would be done inside the toolbox.

5

I don’t think it is possible like that:

[X@toolbox ~]$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)
6

That’s most likely because that locale is not installed. You should be able to install it with

sudo dnf -y install glibc-langpack-en

(again inside the toolbox container)

3 Likes
7

Indeed, many thanks!!!