Fatal Error - The user interface language cannot be determined

mark.murphy · October 8, 2023, 4:05pm

I’m using Libre Office 7.6 on Linux Mint 21.2 and I’m getting a fatal error when launching any of the Office applications:

The user interface language cannot be determined

Fatal Error

I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but the error persists.

It did used to work, and I think it was upgrading from Linux Mint 20 to 21 which broke Libre Office, but I can’t be 100% sure.

Any suggestions on how to fix or diagnose this issue would be very gratefully received

RobertG · October 8, 2023, 4:20pm

Never seen such an error. I’m using OpenSUSE 15.4 64bit rpm Linux.

Did you install all packages of LO, which are available?
Which is source of the packages: Linux Mint repository or directly installed from LibreOffice packages?

mark.murphy · October 8, 2023, 7:56pm

I installed via:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa -y
sudo apt install libreoffice

which pulled down numerous dependencies, but also recommended some optional ones which I also installed:

libreoffice-lightproof-en
libreoffice-help-en-gb
libreoffice-l10n-en-gb
libreoffice-evolution

RobertG · October 8, 2023, 8:03pm

So its the version from your distribution.
You have used LibreOffice before? Then have a look at the directory for the user data:
home/user/.config/libreoffice/4
rename '4' to '4old'. So LO will generate a new user folder. You could switch back to the old folder by deleting the new created folder and renaming the old to '4' if it doesn’t work well.

mark.murphy · October 11, 2023, 5:51pm

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately it didn’t change the behaviour or error message.

I also tried specifying the language via command line options

/soffice.bin --calc --language=en-GB

I tried a few other languages such as en-US too, but none resolved the error.

--safe-mode didn’t help either.

Are there any logging options I could enable to get more information?

RobertG · October 12, 2023, 7:35am

Download a version directly from LO: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/.

Have seen this version working also on Ubuntu, which uses *.deb-packages. I’m using OpenSUSE with rpm packages here.

mikekaganski · October 12, 2023, 7:53am

What are your environment’s locale and language settings?

mark.murphy · October 12, 2023, 9:50am

English GB

$ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
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=

mark.murphy · October 12, 2023, 9:54am

It’s working now. Thanks for your help and suggestions.

What I did was:

Used apt list | grep "libreoffice" to get all currently installed packages. There were ~230 of them.
Removed them with apt remove
Downloaded the .deb packages from the link you provided above
Extracted files from the archive
Installed packages via apt install ./*.deb

LibreOffice then worked for me.

thanks again