After upgrade, "Update standard folders to current language" threatens to rename your home folder

One more thing: I haven't ever changed login language. That adds to the confusion. I see I'm not the only person confused by this dialog:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=685245

ps. My login language is English (United Kingdom).

pps. As well as no help text and confusing dialog text, Google doesn't reveal much about this dialog either.

ppps. When I then visited the System -> Administration -> Language Support, it told me not all the modules for my language were installed properly. It needed the Firefox module for English (United Kingdom). So I said "ok" and it installed Firefox 2!!!! Ouch.

When I turned on my computer today I was greeted by a similar window, proposing to change /home/gog into /home/gog/Templates. I think I removed the empty Templates directory yesterday. As Jamie I did not change any language settings. I'm using Hardy.

Hi,

I'm using Hardy too. I've done a routine system update today, and when I turned on my computer later the "Update standard folders to current language" dialog box appeared, asking me to change my home/[user] directory to /home/[user]/public. I had not changed any of my language settings too.

Best regards,
G.

Ps.
Some of my icons form the main menu changed, and some program settings under wine were lost too.

       I experienced this problem with Ibex, but without updating. I installed Cinelerra (video editing program) and gave it a folder named "video" for storage. Now I get a warning that I have booted in "another language" with an offer to change the video file that I created.

       All of us seem to be using a video program. Our files are named "video" or "pictures." Are we all using Cinelerra? Did this program somehow manage to change our named storage files to Japanese characters? If so, there is a bug in both Cinelerra and Ubuntu.

        I think the boot-up screen message is trying to tell me that I have booted in "another language" (English) and will get my now missing "video" directory back if I click "yes." The language of the warning should give the language we boot in and ask if we want the other files in the same language. Anything else is confusing.

        I am too inexperienced to convey this information to the bug posts, but I think someone should examine the code of Cinelerra and see if it is the cause of the problem.

        I am using 64-bit Ibex if that could possibly make a difference. Cinelerra was not on my computer when I used earlier versions of Ubuntu. The problem developed immediately after and affected only the file I assigned to the program.

  PS to above:

            After backing to another disk, I took the "yes" option and got my "Video" directory back. Everything is intact. The warning message needs clarity.

After upgrading to karmic, I get the "Update standard folders to current language?" dialog with
Current folder name = /home/duncan
and New folder name = /home/duncan/Videos
I had earlier changed the language to UK english.

I was looking for this bug to file this report.

I came across this situation in a situation due to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/380171

Rainy River, Ont., Canada is the closest area to Duluth, MN, USA so upon installation a while back, I had selected Rainy River (as it claims it is for Time Zones).

Upon updating my distro to the recent builds of Karmic, the login screen gave me an easy option to change my language -- I noticed my language was defaulted to English (Canada). I switched to English (United States) to remove the metric defaults and was presented with this seemingly "very bad" screen. What it is asking to do, seems that it would ruin the file structure.

Mine was
from: /home/ttilberg/Desktop
to: /home/ttilberg/Downloads

What happens to my Desktop when I say "yes" ?

Thanks for everything you folks do.

I have something similar too, on Karmic. My language is set as UK English, but I haven't changed it any time recently.

The standard folders it wishes to change on my system are 'Desktop', into 'Downloads' - a folder that already exists.

The same has situation started to happen on Karmic since a few days ago: "Desktop" wants to be renamed to "Downloads".

I use UK English as well. The language was set at the first installation of Hardy.

I got the same prompt also, asking for a couple of directories.
Here is my .config/user-dirs.dirs file. I'm going to manually correct it.

~$ cat .config/user-dirs.dirs
# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in xdg-user-dirs.

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs.

I'm having this issue in maverick. I changed language from English (India) to English (US)and now I'm getting thee dialog with the following.
Current folder name New folder name
"/home/user/Desktop" /home/user/Downloads
/home/user /home/user/Music

Also I found that Me menu sound applet etc is also not working now. I dont know if it has anything to do with the language change.

Yep, this is STILL happening. Seems Ubuntu no longer likes UK English. The rather annoying update manager kept asking to install Canadian English and Zulu (WTF?) and I couldn't stop it trying to "suggest" updates I didn't want. Eventually, I wasn't vigilant enough, and the "suggested" updates got their way. I now have no mouse use. When the "Update standard folders to current language?" menace pops up I can't proceed any further, because its interface is MOUSE ONLY (unforgiveable!). It wouldn't be so bad if the menace box told me which languages it thinks I'm changing from and to. On trying the restore option on boot, and trying to fix dpkg, I am told (multiple times) "Could not resolve gb.archive.ubuntu.com". Is the UK a no-go area for Ubuntu?

I believe comment 12 is the key here. The dialogue has a very poor explanation but is trying to do the right thing. After confirming my configuration was similar to comment 12, I proceeded with "yes" and it all worked fine. I also noticed that my .config/user-dirs.locale contained "en-US" (my old setting) before accepting the changes and "en-GB" (the new setting) after accepting.

It is simply noticing either old default, manual changes, or defaults for languages that didn't used to have translations are pointing to the wrong place, and now we have a more sensible default - either triggered by user changing the locale or a translations update.

In my case it looked like it was trying to rename my Desktop to "Downloads". What is really happening is that my downloads location was in fact Desktop (I think this was the old default?), and it simply wanted to give it the proper name. I would guess that if you didn't trigger this by changing language, then your translations have been updated. For example, your English-India pack used to be missing the Music translation so defaulted to /home/user. When the missing translation is filled in, it tries to confirm that the setting is /home/user/Music, fails, and asks you what to do.

I think the behavior is desirable in most cases, but the explanation needs massive improvement. The only case I can imagine this being undesirable behavior would be if the user had manually (and deliberately) changed hiis directories from the defaults.

Just happened in 32-bit Lucid. It changed the folders from German to English for the affected user.

This bug just occurred to me on oneiric, it's been how long since Lucid? Still not assigned? This started happening to me when I created a new user and switched to that new user using fast user switching

Please can it be attended to or better explained in the error box.

Thanks

It's a persistent little bugger. I'm running Precise Pangolin beta, have been for some weeks, and after a lengthly update yesterday, this popped up when I next logged on. It wanted to rename /home/jim -> /home/jim/Downloads and /home/jim -> /home/jim/Music . .../Downloads exists and .../Music is a symlink to a directory on a bigger partition. Like previous reports, I have not touched the language settings in any way.

Yup - running PP beta, just restarted from updates, and I got this same question, with the same really weird renaming ideas. I definitely did not change the language settings knowingly, though when I opened Language Support, it said that there were a couple of minor packages (amarok-help-en and assorted random things) that needed to be installed, and then English (Canada) was unexpectedly at the top of the list.

This just happened to me, not after a version upgrade but just a large update on July 17 2012 on 12.04. Wants to rename everything to Chinese. Gnome 3 (not using Unity) menus are now mostly I am not amused.

12.04 language change not requested, happened on reboot after update.

I had the same thing. I clicked "keep old names" hoping that nothing would change, but as soon as I did that I noticed that all my menus, notifications, etc are in Chinese (or Japanese? I can't tell the difference). My language is still set to english in /etc/default/locale, so I don't know how to fix it...

Ubuntu 12.04: 3.2.0-34-generic #53-Ubuntu SMP Thu Nov 15 10:48:16 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Like Ken, my locale changed to Chinese:
$ locale
LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=zh_CN:en_US:en
LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="zh_CN.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=

$ cat .config/user-dirs.dirs
...
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Documents"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/Videos"

Screenshot of change to Chinese

This just happened to me after rebooting. The dialog asks me to change /home/trusktr to /home/trusktr/Templates.

Before reboot, I had deleted the Templates folder because it was empty. I guess it noticed, and I proceeded with it's suggestion, which re-created the Templates folder. You will probably get a similar message if you delete Pictures, Videos, Downloads, etc.

I have it asking me to rename /home/davidmaxwaterman to /home/davidmaxwaterman/Documents. This is after a fresh install of 13.04 and restoring /home/davidmaxwaterman from backup, and rebooted.

The "Ubuntu suddenly in Chinese" bug is bug 1035219.

Wow, this bugginess is still around in 16.04. Today after a minor upgrade this offer to change folders came up. I initially declined the offer but when it persisted I accepted and my Download folder with 13 GB of data disappeared - poof - and was replaced with an empty Download folder. Fortunately, after reading the above comments it seemed the data was still around and turned out to be fairly easy to locate. The Download folder was tucked away in Home's .cache folder. A new Download folder had been created, so it was a simple matter to merge the two and everything is now back to normal. What fun :-/

As of today Ubuntu also asks me to rename my home :/

See my post above.

This happens since I removed the unused (I thought) "Desktop" directory in my home.