Just a note to say that restoring the deleted locale-archive file fixed at least my problems nicely, even though it was from a scratchbox. The UI lag seemed not to be caused by it or the othe rootfs freeing tips done as it disappeared after next reboot.

Over 50 mb more rootfs space was well worth the hassle!

I have the same issue. All text labels are showing the label names instead of the correct text message.

Example is my clock says "wdgt_va_24h_time"

I have tried all the suggestions above. Can someone confirm that this is related to the locale folder in usr/share. thanks.

Think so.....

I would like to remove unused lang files also wich files do I remove? I only need english.

FWIW, I keep a few that started with 'en' for English....such as:

en

en_US

since I'm in USA...and deleted the rest....

I did the moverootsh.sh and all seemed ok for the short term.
Then my phone has started playing silly buggers. Freezing, icons not loading, a blank outline of the system area display appearing and not allowing access to the system area display pull down.
I have rebooted, left battery out for a while and rebooted, restored a back up and even used the system update though no luck. I am assuming it was this as it ocured after installing the iBlack theme and doing this.
I tried reinstalling the locales as noted above though couldn't find them basically. Any suggestions please guys.

Stephen

I too had deleted my /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive file and had the same symptom as many others have mentioned in this forum. The difference is that I was able to regenerate the file without having to flash the device, and the benefit is that the newly regenerated file is only 1.2 MB instead of 28.4 MB.

1) create /etc/locale.gen, the contents of the file should look something like:

en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8

2) run the following command as root:

locale-gen

3) You should now see a new /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive that is much smaller than the one that got deleted

4) I also ran the following command as root, although I do not know if it is necessary or not:

setlocale

5) reboot

6) enjoy

Thanks to the guys who went there first.

I dove in on this (after installing backupMenu, of course)

and moved a bunch of the locale cruft off to backups,
rebooted into the system with messed up displays etc.

I did not need to reflash - the key files are:

/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive (only this single file here - the big one)
and
/usr/share/locale/locale.alias (very important for Hildon+etc I guess?)
/usr/share/locale/-whatever-locales-you-use/LC_MESSAGES/*

when you run locale-gen you are working from the files in
/usr/share/i18n to generate your locale
For those who are not squeamish about it you can directly edit
those (like putting en_GB to having ISO-8601 maybe- my try
and so far no problems - It does look like most of the garbled
date-time formats are hard-coded into the widgets/apps/etc).


First this:
not sure if you need the --reinstall
(- I think I forgot to use --reinstall)

then this:

set locale seems to be unnecessary from what I can see

The result is confirmed

that most of the locale-archive file is non-critical bloatware
designed for people on different planets (from wherever you are).

thanks guys..

and a big thank you to a guy on the forum who I do not know
but has put a lot of good information out at
http://www.sumoudou.org/Non-Sumou.html

which is where I started from

I just had the same problem, but this thread saved me from flashing.
But I had to slightly change the contents of /etc/locale.gen because the UTF-8 part is not in the locales directory names (anymore?). So mine looks like this:

I wanted to comment for maybe future reference.

I too had screwed up my locale files with all the moveroot scripts and all.

I read the first page of this thread and thought my only option was to flash, and right before flashing I read the second page (doh!) but unfortunately nothing seemed to work.

Im not very good at linux, more than what i have learned with the n900 for the past year 1/2, so I started to look up what exactly happened and why locale-gen and the other ideas from here were not working, and I came to realize that mooveroot.sh moves everything to /home/usr/share/locale and the move-to-root.sh moves everything to /opt and creates a symlink to that file.

so by deleting the /usr/share/locale file and doing as root
ln -s /home/usr/share/locale /usr/share/locale
/reboot

it all worked, maybe I am the only one that this has ever happened to, but I guess if its not, then maybe this post will help you.

like i said, im not linux savvy at all, and was almost considering reflashing, so finding this out by myself was a big achievement :P lol