Installing Linux in Languages Other than English?

m0nkyman asks: "My company has just hired a Mexican and his whole family has moved up here to Canada to join him. As the in-house tech geek I'm planning to put together a computer as a gift to the family for school etc. Although they are learning English, I know they'll be happier in a Spanish environment. My question is which Linux distribution has the best Spanish language support, and are there any hints for how to install it for an English only geek? This isn't something I've run into before, but I'm sure others have... right? I've looked at here for help, but I'd like other recommendations."

SuSE

[Phleg]

Use SuSE. It has great Spanish support from what I've seen. As for setting it up, you can change the language *after* installation, too, I believe. If not, just have him there to translate for you.

Re:SuSE

[Menthos]

Use SuSE. It has great Spanish support from what I've seen. As for setting it up, you can change the language *after* installation, too, I believe.

So does Red Hat Linux too... and it wouldn't surprise me if also Mandrake Linux had it. Spanish is a big language, and most of the well-known distributions prioritize support for Spanish. So you should really make the distribution choice mainly for other reasons.

Conectiva?

[StandardDeviant]

Conectiva seems to be effectively RedHat localized to Portugese (sp?) or Spanish for the sudamerican Linux market. I don't speak either language, so I can't personally vouch for how good of a job they do. Of course, like another poster has mentioned, Windows is a good idea as well, both becuase it is likely more thoroughly localized (hey, they do pay money to people, which is a great incentive to do the job well) and becuase (since you mentioned school), more educational software will be available for the machine.

Mandrake

[penguinboy]

I haven't tried anything besides English myself, but Mandrake presents a long list of translations to install (you can even have multiple languages installed, so it may even be possible to install and configure in English and then switch it over to Spanish).

Let them use it in English

[Dashslot]

You'll be doing them a favour. They will probably have enough opportunities to speak Spanish, but would appreciate having their computer speak the language of the land, so to speak.

6 Years ago, I left England to live in Spain. At the beginning I didn't speak a word of Spanish, but on my first day of work I sat down with the freshly released Win95 in Spanish. I'd never seen it before (I had been used to Sparcs and SunOs previously;) but it helped me memorise my first few words of Spanish... Salir, Buscar, dame dos cañas, por favor, etc.

Seeing the same words repeated over and over is really a very useful thing, and if they're going to learn something new, it really is better to learn it in the language they will be speaking.

Of course, make sure you set up and teach them how to use the compose key to enable non accented keyboards write accents. Very important if they do need to write in Spanish.

Anyway, to have it speak Mexican spanish, set LANG and LC_ALL=es_MX, in /etc/profiles and in the X startup stuff. Make sure your locales are setup properly (ie in /etc/locales). And as an added bonus set up Netscape/Mozilla etc to use Spanish ahead of English for those pages which support that stuff (eg Google, Debian, Sourceforge)

Don't forget the keyboard

[unitron]

Search eBay and the surplus dealers for a keyboard with Spanish characters so they can put the upside down punctuation marks at the front of a sentence and the squiggly thing on top of the "N". And some other letter, I think.

Re:Don't forget the keyboard

[Dashslot]

Yóü dòñ't néèd á sêíâl kë¥bøarð!, just the compose key which is normally mapped to the right hand windows key or scroll lock. Worth its weight in gold.

Re:Don't forget the keyboard

[unitron]

Well for that matter you can use ALT+xyz where xyz is 000-255 depending upon which character you want, but if this is going to be a computer for a Spanish speaking family in an English speaking country I don't think they need things made more complicated rather than less. At least not the parents, the kids will probably learn how to recompile the kernal in a week or two, but they'll be able to special tricks on a Spanish keyboard as easily as an "American" one.

Re:Don't forget the keyboard

[Dashslot]

Compose n ~ is a hell of a lot more intuitive than alt + 0241 (no not those numbers, those over there) wouldn't you say? Plus that alt trick doesn't even work under X at least.

And why put them at a disadvantage compared with every one else in their country (in this case Canada with its own messed up keyboard needs;)?

Re:Don't forget the keyboard

[unitron]

If you have no idea what a compose key is ("I don't want to write a song, I want to write a letter to my Tio Diego!"), then intuitive is you press the key on which is engraved the letter that you want and the letter that you want pops into existence on the screen.

Re:Don't forget the keyboard

[Dashslot]

If somebody is setting the computer up for you, they can tell you that to get a letter with an accent, press the magic key then the key then the accent. It is not a hard concept to grasp. It is intuitive and if you need to type something in French then you can use the same technique. And you are not at a disadvantage by being tied to a non standard keyboard if you go to school/work/the library/etc.