Hi,

Can somebody tell me how I can install a French Linux or Japanese Linux etc.,

I am used to working with Windows for different languages and would like to do the same on a Linux environment.

Thanks.

During installation most distro give the choice with language to use.
But I do not know if it is possible with all languages , but French should be there , because there are distro with a French origin.Best way down load some Live Cds and try to find out with languages are supported.


all the best

Hey, I'll give that a go, thanks again!

Ubuntu does have French language option and even Red Hat based. Thats for sure.

just one quick question, if I'm running my linux machine in French, if I want to change to German is it easy to do so or do I need to reinstall?

Search this forum this question has been asked before and answerd , speaking out my mind no, you do not have to reinstall


all the best

It is very easy to change languages in Linux. If you are using GNOME, you could open a terminal, and then change the LANG variable to the language you prefer to use. Then, you just run the program from the terminal and you'll be running that program in the language you just selected. Because of this you can run many programs in different languages at the same time.

The thing is, if you didn't install the "locales" (or, the languages your computer can use to display for program/time/etc.) for other languages, as seems to be the case, you won't be able to do this on regular programs (on programs that use their own language package this doesn't apply. e.g. OpenOffice, firefox, etc). So:

This shows you the languages you can use in your computer.

If you don't have the locales needed, you will have to generate them.

In Debian the file that has all the files that can be generated is in /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED , in your computer it probably is the same, or a similar one (check for more information).
So you to see what language you want. You said you want French, right? That would be :
fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8
fr_FR ISO-8859-1
fr_FR@euro ISO-8859-15
You might want them all.

Now that we know what locale we want to generate, the next thing we have to do is exactly that, to generate them.

So, again in Debian, the name of the file is /etc/locale.gen (if you don't have this file you might want to see the man page for locale.gen <man locale.gen> and see where it is), you edit fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8, etc, all the languages you want to add(You better not forget English though...).
And finally, as root, you do
which will generate the locales, thus finally enabling you to use your new languages.

As I told you, all you need to do now in order to change the language of a program you are going to use is to open a terminal, change the LANG variable to the locale you'd like to use (for french in this case ) and the you just type the name of the program in your terminal.

BTW, in KDE you can do pretty much anything by only clicking around, you might prefer this desktop environment.

Hi, Thanks for such a detailed answer. I'll defo use your advice and reckon from what you say I shouldn't have too many problems. Thanks.

Hi,

I'm back to you again about locales...

I found the files containing the relevant locales, now I want to open a terminal, but I don't know how to do this....

Do I use something like reflection x or something?

What I want to do is launch Firefox in say French, now I know how to change the locale can you tell me how to launch a terminal a run firefox?

Thanks again for your help.

If you told us your distro, and window manager (Eg KDE Gnome, whatever) we'd find it easier to help you. A good idea is to put it in your "Profile". See mine, at the left?
For KDE it's K-> System-> Konsole
Then type the name of the application you wish to launch eg firefox-2 or whatever it is called on your distro.

If all you wanted to do was to use your web browser (firefox) in another language, I guess it depends on your distro's configuration for it (the method I wrote earlier might not apply for it). For firefox for example, you probably would have to look for the necessary locales on your package manager/repositories ( use synaptic ?), and somewhere there is a package called something like "mozilla-firefox-locale-fr-fr" (that's how it is called in my distro). Locales for firefox can't be generated locally, so after installed the locale package needed, you'd just have to run firefox and... well, somewhere in the edit-> preferences menu has to have a select language menu.