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 normally not exist, so create it):

# cat /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
zh_TW.UTF-8 UTF-8
zh_TW BIG5
zh_TW.EUC-TW EUC-TW
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US ISO-8859-1
en_US.ISO-8859-15 ISO-8859-15

You can then do a ‘dpkg-reconfigure locales’ and they will be generated correctly. For a list of supported locales, try this:

cat /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED | grep US

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’:

mysql> select PASSWORD('abracadabra');
+-------------------------------------------+
| PASSWORD('abracadabra')                   |
+-------------------------------------------+
| *38794E19D534EBA4F0F78903FA00F1DA2989DCA2 | 
+-------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Next, since we already have the prompt open, do this command:

mysql> USE mysql;
mysql> UPDATE user SET password='*38794E19D534EBA4F0F78903FA00F1DA2989DCA2' where user='debian-sys-maint';
mysql> FLUSH privileges;

Restart MySQL, and the error should have gone away.