Btop - No UTF-8 Locale Detected

23 April 2025, 12:01:40

Running Btop says I don't have utf-8, I don't understand why I get this error.
The utf-8 extension is missing in some locations.
Btop is not the only program that has an issue when querying locale.

How do I fix this situation so programs recognise utf-8 properly?

Code: [Select]

~$ btop

ERROR: No UTF-8 locale detected!
Use --utf-force argument to force start if you're sure your terminal can handle it.

Running 'locale' to see what is happening. This is the only list which doesn't include a utf-8 extension. This is possibly the source of the errors.

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~$ locale

LANG=en_IL
LC_CTYPE="en_IL"
LC_NUMERIC=en_IL
LC_TIME=en_IL
LC_COLLATE="en_IL"
LC_MONETARY=en_IL
LC_MESSAGES="en_IL"
LC_PAPER=en_IL
LC_NAME=en_IL
LC_ADDRESS=en_IL
LC_TELEPHONE=en_IL
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_IL
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_IL
LC_ALL=

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~$ locale --all-locales

C
C.utf8
en_IL   //Here also, no utf-8 extension.
en_IL.utf8
en_US.utf8
POSIX

Could the problem start from the Calameres installer?

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~$ cat /etc/locale.gen

# Configuration file for locale-gen
#

# Locales enabled by Calamares
en_IL UTF-8        //Does not include the utf-8 extension.
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

Re: Btop - No UTF-8 Locale Detected

Reply #1 – 27 April 2025, 09:31:14

This is the fix for terminal applications like Btop:

adding the
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

to the
~/.bashrc file, solved the issue

run this in your terminal:

Code: [Select]

~$  echo 'export LANG=en_US.UTF-8' >> ~/.bashrc

https://github.com/aristocratos/btop/issues/81

But, I have another application that is not Terminal based. It also has UTF-8 problems.

In the one report, the extension '.UTF-8' is missing, and the developer of Xiphos said it should be present. He stated my issue is not his application, but my system has misconfigured the locales. Additionally, he said I should consider installing fonts that work better across all applications, like Open Source Font packs.
One year ago I didn't have any problems running Xiphos, now it doesn't display fonts properly. From my perspective something in that software changed to create this problem. I've never had to mess with locales, not on Debian or Arch.