Ubuntu – How to install one language by command-line

12.04command linelanguage

I'm trying to have everything ready to install a new desktop with a few command line instructions.
Unfortunately, to install the language packages, I couldn't find how to do it.

I can run

gnome-language-selector

But it doesn't seems to be usable in command line directly. I need to go on with clicks…

An other thing that could be done is that I do those clicks and find out which packages have been installed and read the changes in /etc/environment and /etc/default/locale (and other /etc/… file?) but the list of packages is probably different depending on the packages installed (Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Gnome, …)

Is there a tool for that? Like let's say :

gnome-language-selector --install fr

or a package that has all necessary dependencies :

sudo apt-get install super-language-pack-fr

Thanks,

Best Answer

For desktop you can

sudo apt-get install language-pack-[cod] language-pack-gnome-[cod] language-pack-[cod]-base language-pack-gnome-[cod]-base

But each applications can have its language pack. To know the packages to be installed try:

check-language-support -l [cod]

For example:

check-language-support -l fr

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change the language order by command-line (or text editor)

List installed locales

locale -a

List current settings

locale

Changing settings temporarily

Any environment variable may be set on the command line for the current process:

$ date
Sat May 14 15:59:12 CEST 2011

$ LC_TIME=zh_CN.UTF-8 

$ date
2011年 05月 14日 星期六 16:00:13 CEST 2011

Changing settings permanently

If you want more fine-grained control, you may manually change your system's locale entries by modifying the file /etc/default/locale.

For example on a German system, to prevent system messages from being translated, you may use:

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=POSIX

Note: changes take effect only after a fresh login.

For Additional Hhelp

Ubuntu – Where is the LANGUAGE environment variable set

Taken from help.ubuntu.com

The LANGUAGE priority list

The "LANGUAGE" environment variable, which is set by the GUIs more often than not on 
Ubuntu desktops, controls language for message and menu display for GNU compatible 
applications. For such applications it overrides whatever locale names are set in 
"LANG" and "LC_MESSAGES".

Unlike "LANG" and "LC_*", "LANGUAGE" should not be assigned a complete locale name 
including the encoding part (e.g. ".UTF-8"). Instead "LANGUAGE" should contain a 
colon separated priority list of language codes, for instance "es:de:en". A single 
language code is also correct.

As lame as a link answer is, this is probably what you want.

The post referenced in the link above explains that if you want to change the language that appears on the command-line then you need to set both LANG and LANGUAGE accordingly in either /etc/default/locale or ~/.pam_environment.

Since you've already tried setting LANGUAGE in /etc/default/locale, I'd try setting it in ~/.pam_environment since that's a user config file and its contents should overwrite anything set in the global environment.

EDIT:

I went ahead and tried duplicating the problem that you described by setting LANGUAGE in /etc/default/locale to "en:ru:en" logging out and then logging back in. It worked. Error messages were then displayed in Russian, at least for the root account (which was the account I was testing this on). Changing the value of LANGUAGE to "en" fixed it.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to change the language order by command-line (or text editor)

Ubuntu – Where is the LANGUAGE environment variable set

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