pon re-installing you will be asked which locales to generate. I ran into some other issues because I installed the package... ems try
<code>
dpkg-reconfigure locales
</code>
To close off this issue and for future problems:
<code>sudo localedef -i 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.
