Ubuntu – I’ve removed Firefox but keep getting prompts for English language pack

If you execute locale you can see the language variables that are used for various sections of the operating system:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

More about locale variables in the gettext manual: Locale Environment Variables - GNU `gettext' utilities

You can export these variables e.g. export LC_PAPER="ru_RU.UTF-8" - this will make a temporary change.

If you want to make it permanent you can change the regional formats using gnome-language-selector. Or you can add the export command in ~/.profile and/or ~/.bashrc

For the papersize, I found that you can edit /etc/papersize - change "letter" to "a4". You might also need to set export LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF_8" (or maybe export LC_PAPER="ru_RU.UTF_8" if ru_RU defaults to A4)

Source: answers.launchpad.net: Question #6846 : Questions : “evince” package : Ubuntu

P.S. Personally I use en_GB (English / United Kingdom) for everything since it uses the SI metric system instead of American English and US units.

A corresponding question was asked about Thunderbird. The solution provided there worked for me:

• go to go to /usr/share/hunspell/
• delete the languages you do not want (e.g. rm de_BE.* to delete Belgian German)

I am not sure why you got the message about incomplete language support - I didn't have that problem.

But in addition, you may still have manually installed dictionaries in Firefox. Interestingly, just disabling/uninstalling wasn't enough (e.g. via Tools | Add-Ons). To get rid of the languages I didn't like, I went to ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/extensions and deleted the dictionalry-folders e.g. rm -r de_BE* that did the trick.