Debian Languages?

[swestrup]

Currently the only language my Debian Lenny installation seems to support is "US English". Its the only language that ever shows up in any sort of drop-down configuration list. This despite the fact that (AFAIK) I have installed all languages, all locales, all EVERYTHING that I know about to get all languages.

Google has turned up no help at all. So, how do I install extra system languages for Debian?

Comments

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

You have to run a command (update-locales? Something like that) to actually generate the languages you want to use from the compressed data files you've installed.

[swestrup]

One would expect the post-package-install trigger to do that for you. Well, in any case I tried it, and nothing happened. I'm still stuck with US English as my only option.

how I get locales

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

dpkg-reconfigure locales

I'm surprised the installer didn't run this step for you and insist you fill in the form to sk for locales. Did you set it to run too automatically for it to ask questions?

I just ran it again on my system, and I have

en_CA.UTF-8
en_GB.UTF-8
es_ES.UTF-8
fr_FR.UTF-8
ja_JP.UTF-8

But there do seem to be a few applications that stick to their default language through thick or thin.

I do recommend UTF-8 everywhere. It is easier for there to be a uniform character code throughout the system. Although I'm told the Japanese hate UTF-8 because most of their characters end up as three bytes each instead of the two bytes they used to use.

-- hendrik

Re: how I get locales

[swestrup]

Well, as the lenny install that finally worked was the 10th install attempt that day, I didn't bother going (yet again) through all the menus and just accepted the defaults. My assumption was that it would be easy to add languages later. So far, no luck.

Re: how I get locales

[hendrikboom.livejournal.com]

10th! Ouch!

But dpkg-reconfigure is the way to reconfigure packages after the installation, using the scripts the installer would use.

Re: how I get locales

[swestrup]

Well, I ran dpkg-configure and told it to activate all installed locales. It gave me a huge list. Then it had me choose a default language. I chose Canadian English (UTF8). So, that all seemed fine.

I then logged out of KDE and back in again and went to the language configuration menu. The only thing offered for any of the installed programs was US English still.

[swestrup]

Okay, I think I've solved this. I've yet to log out and back in, but I found out on a KDE forum that I need to install specific KDE user interfaces for each language I want to be able to choose. So, I need to install a whole bunch of kde-i18n-* packages, and that should give me what I want.

Except, of course, that there is no package for Canadian English.