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.

Click the Multiple languages button near the botom of the list to go to the screen to select additional languages for 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 first screen and Español in the Multiple languages screen.

[Note] Note

You are advised to install the language of your keyboard and the language of the country you live in as additional languages if they are not the same as your preferred language.

[Note] Note

About UTF-8 (unicode) support: Unicode is a character encoding intended to cover all existing languages. Mageia Linux uses UTF-8 by default for all languages

  1. If you know UTF-8 encoding doesn't work well for your language, tick the box Old compatibility (non-UTF) encoding at the top of the Multiple languages screen

  2. Be aware that this will then apply to all languages on your system

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 date.

[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.