2. Choosing your Language
The first step is to
choose your preferred language.
Open the tree relative to
the continent you're located in, then choose your language. Your
language choice will affect the installer, the documentation, and
the system in general.
Use the list
accessible through the Multi
languages button 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, Mandriva Linux's use of
UTF-8 depends on your choice: 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 use
Unicode by default. If two or
more languages are to be installed, and those languages don't use
the same encoding, then Unicode is 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 option. Selecting support for a
language means translations, fonts, spell checkers, etc. are also
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 only changes the language settings for that particular
user. |