NB: this write-up has been superseded. You should be reading this article instead.

It took me a while to figure out how to make Larry’s postings to #perl6 not break my screen session. Now that I’ve figured it out, I’ll see if I can share it with y’all. In addition to screen and irssi displaying garbage, I also got a lot of these errors (I hope this helps those of you who use google to search for error strings):

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
	LANGUAGE = (unset),
	LC_ALL = "en_US.UTF-8",
	LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

$ sudo apt-get install locales

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

At this point, you should be good. If you’re using screen, remember to pass the -U argument when re-attaching. I usually do something like this:

$ screen -rxU irc