I saw this on 13.10, installed 12.04 and made a clean installation of ThinLinc and which suffered from the same problem. The problem appears as tracebacks in vsmserver and error logging in tlwebaccess when trying to connect using a username with non ascii characters. When manual restarting service using service command the system locale environment is used and services works as expected.
There are also a problem with tl-setup which unsets locale which will make the services run with wrong locale.
This bug revealed a more fundamental problem with non-ascii usernames (see bug 5102). Depending on the outcome of that bug, this bug might be irrelevant.
According to this page, all services will have locale set when Ubuntu switches to systemd: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers
Testing Ubuntu 16.04 and haven't seen any problems. This is the environment for the vsmserver process: > root@dhcp-253-174:/proc/27417# cat environ | tr '\0' '\n' > SHELL=/bin/bash > GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge > PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin:/opt/>thinlinc/bin:/opt/thinlinc/sbin > QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=appmenu-qt5 > PWD=/ > LANG=en_US.UTF-8 > SHLVL=2 > XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/local/share:/usr/share:/var/lib/snapd/desktop > _=/opt/thinlinc/sbin/vsmserver So it looks like it is running with a locale set? Close?
Verified that it runs with a locale set both when started manually and after a machine reboot. Works fine in both cases. We assume that this got fixed when Ubuntu switched from upstart to systemd. The amount of supported non-systemd Ubuntu installations out there is probably not very big, so we are closing this bug.
