Cannot set LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Question

I am trying to solve my locale errors. I have followed most of the threads and repeated the instructions without success. I either miss something obvious or there is something not so obvious with the procedure.

Right now I live in Germany but the languages that I have enabled are English (US) and Greek. For some reason German language packages are also shown in my locale configuration, which I don't completely understand since I think that is derived from my specified timezone.

locale gives

locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=el_GR.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:el_GR
LC_CTYPE="el_GR.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="el_GR.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=C
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

I have tried overwriting my etc/default/locale file to set both LC_CTYPE and LC_ALL but nothing changes. Do you know what might be going wrong?

currently my etc/default/locale

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"

Answer 1

To set LC_CTYPE="el_GR.UTF-8", you need to install the language-pack-el-base package which contains the necessary translation (.mo) files for Greek language:

sudo apt-get install language-pack-el-base

Answer 2

You can set those environment vars by:

sudo vi /etc/environment

add these lines

LANG=en_US.utf-8
LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8