The gnome-terminal application fails to start when the system locale is set to non-UTF8

Environment

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

Issue

• gnome-terminal fails to initialize when system locale is set to non-UTF8. The logs below are found in /var/log/messages:

systemd[2119]: Starting GNOME Terminal Server...
gnome-terminal-server[2771]: Non UTF-8 locale (ANSI_X3.4-1968) is not supported!
systemd[2119]: gnome-terminal-server.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=8/n/a
systemd[2119]: gnome-terminal-server.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
systemd[2119]: Failed to start GNOME Terminal Server.

systemd[2119]: Starting GNOME Terminal Server...
gnome-terminal-server[2771]: Locale not supported.
systemd[2119]: gnome-terminal-server.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=9/n/a
systemd[2119]: gnome-terminal-server.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
systemd[2119]: Failed to start GNOME Terminal Server.
org.gnome.Terminal.desktop[2766]: # watch_established: "/org/gnome/desktop/a11y/" (establishing: 1)
org.gnome.Terminal.desktop[2766]: # Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: Timeout was reached

• According to the solution gnome-terminal fails to launch on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, this issue was already fixed in RHEL 7. But gnome-terminal is failing to launch on RHEL 8 and RHEL 9.

Resolution

• This issue is a configuration issue, not a bug. Use UTF8 locales on the system. For details about how to set system locale, refer to this documentation.

Note:- It is ideal to set non-UTF8 locale at the application level that requires it.

Root Cause

• gnome-terminal in RHEL 7 was originally released with support for non-UTF8 locales. So dropping that support in the middle of the RHEL 7 lifecycle was considered a regression and it was fixed. However, in RHEL 8 and later releases, it does not support non-UTF8 locales anymore.

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