I followed the instructions for getting locales working in "(guix)Application Setup" to no effect initially. I'm running over RHEL6, if that's relevant, and I have: $ locale LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8" LC_ALL= $ export -p | grep GUIX declare -x GUIX_LOCPATH="/home/dlove/.guix-profile/lib/locale" $ find $GUIX_LOCPATH -name en_GB.UTF-8 /home/dlove/.guix-profile/lib/locale/2.24/en_GB.UTF-8 but saw this (note the warning): $ guix --version warning: failed to install locale: Invalid argument guix (GNU Guix) 20161208.12 Copyright (C) 2016 the Guix authors License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. strace showed it looking in "locale/2.23", not "locale/2.24", despite the environment. "guix" there was from the /usr/local/bin link suggested by the installation instructions. After a "guix package -i guix" (to the same version of guix, but now in .guix-profile), I don't get the warning but I wonder why that should have made a difference and why the environment seems to be ignored.