The first step is to
choose your preferred language.
Your choice of preferred
language will affect the installer, the documentation, and the
system in general. First select the region you're located in, then
the language you speak.
Clicking on
the Advanced button will allow you to
select other languages to be installed on your workstation,
thereby installing the language-specific files for system
documentation and applications. For example, if Spanish users are
to use your machine, select English as the default language in the
tree view and Español in the Advanced
section.
![[Note]](images/note.png) | Note |
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About
UTF-8 (unicode) support: Unicode is a
character encoding intended to cover all existing
languages. However full support for it in GNU/Linux is still
under development. For that reason, Mandrakelinux's use of UTF-8 will
depend on the user's choices: If you choose a
language with a strong legacy encoding (latin1 languages,
Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thaï, Greek, Turkish, and most
iso-8859-2 languages), the legacy encoding will be used by
default. Other languages will use
Unicode by default. If two or
more languages are to be installed, and those languages are not using
the same encoding, then Unicode will be used for the whole
system. Finally, Unicode can
also be forced for use throughout the system at a user's request
by selecting the Use Unicode by default
option independently of which languages have been chosen.
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Note that
you're not limited to choosing a single additional language. You
may choose several, or even install them all by selecting the
All languages box. Selecting support for a
language means translations, fonts, spell checkers, etc. will also
be installed for that language. Make sure you select all languages
that are likely to be useful on the machine now, it may be difficult
to configure support for languages not chosen at
install time at a later time.
![[Tip]](images/tip.png) | Tip |
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To switch between the various
languages installed on your system, you can launch the
localedrake command as root to
change the language used by the entire system. Running the command
as a regular user will only change the language settings for that
particular user. |