How annoying. The default locale on a default Ubuntu 10.4 on Linode is...well I'm not sure that it's even set to anything. So how do you fix this and ensure that you get full UTF-8 goodness? Well...I'm still not entirely sure, but I think I'm on to something. I'm sure I'm doing it completely wrong, but after spending upwards of an hour trying to figure out how to fix this I just don't really care anymore as long as it works.
The magic incantation appears to be update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8. Doing this and rebooting your computer you will be greeted with...something that's still not UTF-8, as for some reason it still decides that it wants to default to ISO-8859. However, if you start screen, you will find out that your screen session is UTF-8 enabled and everything works peachy.
Yeah. Pretty dumb, especially when there appear to have been perfectly fine and easy ways to configure the locale in previous versions of ubuntu. Unfortunately, localeconf no longer exists as a package and dpkg-reconfigure locales doesn't actually give you any interactive prompts. The only clue I have to go on is that /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local appears to list both ISO-8859 and UTF-8 versions of en_US. I don't want to delete ISO-8859, since I'm pretty sure it's needed for some legacy applications that don't support UTF-8, but I don't have a clue how to make UTF-8 the default when logging in.
EDIT: In debian I can't get any further but the reconfigure command is aptitude install locales and then dpkg-reconfigure locales.
EDIT #2: Another Ubuntu VPS that I have tried recently doesn't even give you the any locales out of the box. aptitude install language-pack-en should give you what you need.
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