dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

and by selecting UTF-8 on the first page, and then my national specific option on the next page, and then Terminus (though others work too) font on the third page.

After that ls and mc displays correct characters in text terminal.

And IMHO oldstable Devuan ASCII upgraded to backports is very stable and nice :b

And Devuan is the best universal Linux distribution suitable for physical hosts.
I would run other distros only in its virtual machines.

Does someone sponsor support work?

I sometimes get a doughnut from golinux, they know how grumpy I get when I'm hungry.

But seriously, thanks for your kind words :-)

We get answers here so quickly and they are very helpful and professional.

Does someone sponsor support work? I have seen many support replies during my life, and it sometimes takes much more time to get even an answer for expensive proprietary software issues those are much easier.

Yes, it is after dist-upgrade -t=ascii-backports

Please be sure to mention this in any future support requests to prevent wasting the time of the people who chose to help you. Thanks.

And I have to ask: is this from your box that has been dist-upgraded from the backports repository?

Yes, it is after dist-upgrade -t=ascii-backports

Do you think nodm produces mentioned above problems only in a backported system like mine?

I am still not motivated for a downgrade anyway, just replaced nodm with slim, and almost everything is OK again.

People live and work on Ceres and it is fine for them generally.

As for me it is important to avoid significant configuration changes which is very seldom even with any and all backports installed on oldstable.

Though I still have to find a solution for text mode national symbols displayed incorrectly (only in Alt+F1..F6 terminal screens), I even did not pay attention to it earlier, may be before backports it was broken the same way.

There are some fields still blank

That is expected — LANGUAGE is a (GNU-specific) override and LC_ALL should *not* be set (as I have already explained).

I've just tried Debian's live KDE image and the locale output in konsole is exactly the same as the output you have posted from the TTY.

Edit /etc/default/locale if you have specific requirements or export the parameters from ~/.profile and source that file from ~/.xsessionrc to make sure it is read from any and all display managers.

See also https://wiki.debian.org/Locale

And I have to ask: is this from your box that has been dist-upgraded from the backports repository?

1) In text terminal Alt+F1:
There are some fields still blank:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
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=

Specifically LANGUAGE= and LC_ALL= are blank.

Also in text terminal I see a font which displays national symbols only partially while replacing about a half of them by a búbi character.
I guess I have to replace used font somehow?

2) During my last upgrade a few days ago I have replaced TDM display manager by nodm, and it seems nodm wipes out all localization fields.
Now I have replaced nodm by slim and at least I see in all terminals the same output of locales command which I see in text terminal described above in 1)

Btw, after replacing nodm by slim a few minutes ago I have correct working of all terminals in the desktop environment, all of them display mc and national symbols well. If I would not check specially I would not even notice that LANGUAGE= and LC_ALL=  fields became blank.

Can you please let me know which script sets values for all LC_* fields from what I specified during re-configuring locales packages?
For now I would like to try at least to recover values for LANGUAGE= and LC_ALL= fields, how to do this?

And perhaps your locales are mis-configured so try

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

Sure, I tried it several times earlier, it does not help at all, I even tried reinstalling different versions of this package and then reverted its version back.

I guess I have to leave the desktop environment and try to recover a good configuration of locales in a general text console at first at Alt+F1.

Is it correct?

I'm not sure (I don't use Plasma or Qt in general) but I think LANGUAGE should be under [Translations] and I know you shouldn't be setting LC_ALL, just leave that one alone.

You could also try exporting the various locale settings via ~/.xsessionrc but that seems very hacky.

And perhaps your locales are mis-configured so try

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

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

Two new problems:
1) locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
2) Most fields became empty in non KDE terminals the same way as in KDE konsole

Something goes wrong

I even cannot revert back without rollback. Will try to see zfs diff.

cat ~/.config/plasma-localerc
[Formats]
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
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=en_US.UTF-8

The problem is still there

I have created a file:
[...]
The problem is still there

I'm not surprised — you've only specified a single element. Try adding all of the missing LC_whatever settings to the file.

cat ~/.config/plasma-localerc
[Formats]
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

The problem is still there

But at least I know a direction where to search for a solution, it is somewhere a KDE personal locales config.

I cannot find a plasma related locales config file

Try creating one yourself with the desired settings then (as suggested in the linked ArchWiki page).

Also check for ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh, that can also change the locale configuration.

The Plasma utilities will expect their configuration to be managed by the Plasma configuration GUI so if you're using them elsewhere then some fiddling is to be expected.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KD … e_settings

Thanks for trying to help me, but I cannot find a plasma related locales config file:

find ~ -name plasma-localerc

find ~ -name \*locale\*