locales generation

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

My wife is from HK and she need Chinese input method sometimes, I'm Italian and I'm her sysadmin. So I decided to install kubuntu in English and later to install everything required to type in Chinese too.
Chinese input methods seems to require Chinese locales installed.
Installing Chinese input method was easier than on Debian but I found hard to generate new locales the "ubuntu" way (if there is any).

I was coming from Debian, so the first thing I did was:
dpkg-reconfigure locales
second thing I did was
dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales
Then I read everything I could starting from apropos locales.
I saw that the way to generate new locales was filling /etc/locale.gen
I filled it, run locale-gen but I didn't obtain any result.
I rerun dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales but still nothing.

As last resort I went to check locale*.deb pkg scripts and I found in preinst:

grep -v '^#' /etc/locale.gen >> /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local ||
true

So I did it manually and finally the new locales were generated.

It seems that man pages or pkg scripts have to be adjusted.

It is unclear how I could set the default locale too.