One problem that has repeatedly cropped up when developing in Java is strange error messages in our unit tests for certain text manipulation tests when running on a freshly installed Ubuntu desktop. They are all related to Ubuntu's default British locale: en_GB.UTF-8 This was causing files checked out of CVS to be in Unicode ( UTF-8 ) format rather than ISO-8859-1 and so the British pound sign (£) was being encoded as a double-byte (rather than single-byte) character in the file. To check which locale you currently have as your default just run: locale Changing the default locale is a little different on Ubuntu compared to most Linux distros, these are the steps we needed to go through to get it changed: Add the locale to the list of 'supported locales' Edit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local and add the following line: en_GB ISO-8859-1 Regenerate the supported locales Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales Change the default locale Edit /etc/environment and ensure the LANG
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