So would something like cat "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" > /etc/locale.gen or to the Ubuntu path, then running locale-gen, make sense to do?

Yep, that should do it. What do you get? Check your locale-gen man page to make sure as well.

@ionFish, it should read echo "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" > /etc/locale.gen.

Oh, silly me. Thanks. I'll post results shortly.

I get the following error still while installing software to the system: fpaste.org/14822/83369136/raw . Any suggestions? Thanks.

That doesn't help. Need to see the log of exactly what locale-gen said.

Here's a log of ALL error messages related to the locales: fpaste.org/14879/70688713/raw

'locale-gen' reports no errors (in fact it shows nothing).

locale-gen showing nothing is definitely a sign of problem. It should begin with Generating locales... . fpaste.org/14979/raw

what Linux are you using?

are you sure you want to re-invent the wheel again? check out grml.org/grml-debootstrap, it is now officially included in Debian archive.

before you destroy /etc/locale.gen, do a cat /etc/locale.gen and see what's inside.

xpt - This is all part of a chroot script I am writing. I can give you the source, or even access to a test server, and you can investigate further. The reason why I have to make a script for it is because it's purely temporary -- once you type 'exit' all of the files are deleted.

It's the fastest way that I have found to make a clean, reliable sandbox environment for testing scripts and compiling stuff quickly. The problems I have come from when I use ANOTHER script I'm working on to try to automatically generate these "templates" (and patch the locales errors).

Of course I could make these templates (just a tar.gz of the debootstrap files) and patch them by hand, but when you mix in 32/64 bit architectures with the many releases of Debian and Ubuntu, it becomes so much of a hassle to keep everything updated. This way I can run it on a daily- or weekly-cron on a server somewhere and not have to worry about outdated systems.

Ok, Check your locale-gen man page to see where that conf file should be. but still that doesn't explain why your locale-gen output is empty. So my suggestion:

1. Check your locale-gen man page to make sure where that conf file is

2. Run it manually, instead of in script, to make everything work first, then script it.

3. Try the aforementioned grml.org/grml-debootstrap. The post-install script is very powerful, I'm sure it will satisfy most if not all of your requests.

make sure

1. 'man' was not installed, so I did so, and it tells me the configuration is at '/etc/belocs/locale-gen.conf' which not surprisingly, does not exist.

2. I used 'dpkg-reconfigure locales' manually last time, and it worked, except that it has a menu interface and does not work with my script (not interactive). I do get those same errors as pasted before.

3. I will do so when I get the chance. But I simply don't need all of the features provided by 'grml-debootstrap'. The scripts I have total maybe 400 lines, and don't require anything installed except for 'debootstrap' to make templates, which is not intended to be done by the end user at all. The templates unzip in seconds, whereas one would have to download packages and wait for them to configure otherwise.

Thanks for the suggestion though, I definitely look forward to testing that package out.

This '/etc/debootstrap/locale.gen' seems promising.