which locales to generate. I ran into some other issues because I installed the package localepurge. Remove this if you have it, it will mess up the initial local...
dpkg-reconfigure locales
</code>
To close off thisissue and for future problems:
<code>sudo localed... lang-f /path/to/charmap lang
</code>
where lang is your language (en_US)
and charmap is UTF-8,
just run locate UTF-8 to find the path.
