Setting Up Locales
Minimal server installs (as is the case with VPS instances) often do not have a locale installed/generated (or at least, not for your particular locale).
A symptom of this looks something like:
$ perl -e 1 perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_AU.utf8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
Steps to generate/install the locale so that this problem does not occur:
Simplest approach (works on recent distributions as of late 2010):
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
More manual approach (found here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=196414) (if the previous does not work):
$ cd /usr/share/locales $ ./install-language-pack en_AU $ dpkg-reconfigure locales