I’ve hit this problem a few times, and figured I’d leave a note for myself how to fix it. Ubuntu 8.04 seems to hiccup sometimes (on a VPS) for generating the correct locales. In particular, I get this error, a lot: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C"). Normally I just do ‘dpkg-reconfigure locales’, but with 8.04, this doesn’t seem to do squat. The solution is to edit the /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local file, and insert the correct locales (it will …

After restoring databases from one server to another I sometimes get this error on Ubuntu or Debian: error: 'Access denied for user 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' (using password: YES)' This makes a lot of sense, and the solution is pretty simple. If you look in: cat /etc/mysql/debian.cnf You’ll see the defaults for your system. Copy the password listed there, and open a connection to MySQL as root (or some other user). Next, enter this (lets say your password specified in debian.cnf was ‘abracadabra’: