How to install recommended packages

Question

On Ubuntu 14.04

$ dpkg --get-selections  | grep ^aspell
$ apt-cache depends aspell
aspell
  Depends: libaspell15
  Depends: libc6
  Depends: libncursesw5
  Depends: libstdc++6
  Depends: libtinfo5
  Depends: dictionaries-common
  Suggests: aspell-doc
  Suggests: spellutils
 |Recommends: aspell-en
 |Recommends: <aspell-dictionary>
    aspell-ca
    aspell-am
    aspell-ar
    aspell-ar-large
    aspell-bg
    aspell-br
    aspell-cs
    aspell-cy
    aspell-de
    aspell-de-alt
    aspell-el
    aspell-en
    aspell-eo
    aspell-eo-cx7
    aspell-es
    aspell-et
    aspell-eu-es
    aspell-fa
    aspell-fo
    aspell-fr
    aspell-ga
    aspell-gl-minimos
    aspell-he
    aspell-hr
    aspell-hsb
    aspell-hu
    aspell-hy
    aspell-id
    aspell-is
    aspell-it
    aspell-kk
    aspell-ku
    aspell-lt
    aspell-lv
    aspell-nl
    aspell-pl
    aspell-pt-br
    aspell-pt-pt
    aspell-ro
    aspell-ru
    aspell-sk
    aspell-sl
    aspell-sv
    aspell-tl
    aspell-uk
    aspell-uz
  Recommends: <aspell6a-dictionary>
    aspell-da
    aspell-no
  Breaks: <aspell-bin>
  Breaks: <aspell-bin:i386>
  Replaces: <aspell-bin>
  Replaces: <aspell-bin:i386>
  Replaces: aspell-hi
  Replaces: <aspell-hi:i386>
  Replaces: aspell-mr
  Replaces: <aspell-mr:i386>
  Conflicts: aspell:i386

Then

apt-get install --install-recommends aspell
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  aspell-en
Suggested packages:
  aspell-doc spellutils
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  aspell aspell-en
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 13 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/346 kB of archives.
After this operation, 711 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 

Why is it not installing the recommended packages, like aspell-ca? What do I need to do to install these?

Answer 1

You've misinterpreted the output from the command.

It already gave you the recommended package for installation based on your language settings and the most likely package in the category of packages you're seeing in the "Recommends:" lines, aspell-en, which is the English dictionaries. The system very likely isn't going to install all the dictionaries for all the different languages that aspell supports (which wouldn't make sense anyways, since you probably won't use them).

---

However...

If you want some of the other languages supported, you will probably have to install them individually, such as if you wanted en (English) and es (Spanish) then: sudo apt-get install aspell-en aspell-es (this will install aspell-en if it's not installed, and also install the Spanish dictionaries in aspell-es)

If you want all the others, you may have to install them all with one massive command like this (Note that this command as it currently stands is not tested and may trigger conflicts. I'm also not sure why you'd want all the dictionaries for all the different languages, since it's insane to want to be installing all of the languages you aren't going to use):

sudo apt-get install aspell-ca \
    aspell-am \
    aspell-ar \
    aspell-ar-large \
    aspell-bg \
    aspell-br \
    aspell-cs \
    aspell-cy \
    aspell-de \
    aspell-de-alt \
    aspell-el \
    aspell-en \
    aspell-eo \
    aspell-eo-cx7 \
    aspell-es \
    aspell-et \
    aspell-eu-es \
    aspell-fa \
    aspell-fo \
    aspell-fr \
    aspell-ga \
    aspell-gl-minimos \
    aspell-he \
    aspell-hr \
    aspell-hsb \
    aspell-hu \
    aspell-hy \
    aspell-id \
    aspell-is \
    aspell-it \
    aspell-kk \
    aspell-ku \
    aspell-lt \
    aspell-lv \
    aspell-nl \ 
    aspell-pl \
    aspell-pt-br \
    aspell-pt-pt \
    aspell-ro \
    aspell-ru \
    aspell-sk \
    aspell-sl \
    aspell-sv \
    aspell-tl \
    aspell-uk \
    aspell-uz \
    aspell-da \
    aspell-no