Question: I recently installed sublime text on a new ubuntu machine.
During start up I get the following error message :

> 
> Your system's locale is set to a value that can not handle non-ASCII
>  characters. Package Control can not properly work unless this is
>  fixed.
> 
> 
> On Linux, please reference your distribution's docs for information on
>  properly setting the LANG environmental variable. As a temporary
>  work-around, you can launch Sublime Text from the terminal with:
> 
> 
> 
> ```
>    LANG=en_US.UTF-8 sublime_text
> 
> ```
> 
> 

I checked for the following in the terminal (zsh shell) `echo $LANG` but this does not return anything i added the following two lines to the `~/.profile` and restarted the terminal, but this did not help as `echo $LANG` did not return anything ?

How can I set my `LANG` env variable in zsh shell ?

Answer: 
User
----

you can declare and export the `LANG` environment variable in your `~/.zshrc`

```
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

```

Logout and log-in again to activate.

System-wide
-----------

For a system wide configuration edit `/etc/default/locale` as follow:

```
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="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"

```

Check
-----

You can get [information about your locale](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Locale#List_current_settings) with:

```
locale

```
first:

```
sudo apt-get purge locales

```

then:

```
sudo aptitude install locales

```

and the famous:

```
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

```

This rids the system of locales, then re-installs locales and downgrades libc6 from 2.19 to 2.13 which is the issue. Then configures locales again.