2. Choosing your Language
The first step is to
choose your preferred 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]](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
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]](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. |