2. Choosing your Language

The first step is to choose your preferred language.

Figure 3.3. Choosing the Default Language

Choosing the Default Language

First open the tree relative to the continent you are located in, and then choose the language you speak. Your language choice will affect the installer, the documentation, and the system in general.

Use the list at the bottom of the tree 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 friends are to use your machine, select English as the default language in the tree view and Español in the list view.

[Note]Note

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:

  1. 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.

  2. Other languages will use Unicode by default.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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 which 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]Tip

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.