Language packages not showing in Language support

Question

In my Ubuntu I went to System Settings > Language support -> Install/Remove Languages and I just get English.

I tried sudo apt-get install language-pack-fr language-pack-gnome-fr language-pack-fr-base language-pack-gnome-fr-base as suggested in the answer to How can I install one language by command-line. For any language I try I get no success with this method.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It appears that the root cause of this issue is that /usr/share/language-selector/data/languagelist is missing or incomplete. This file can be found in the package language-selector-common. A quick peek at dpkg -l *language-selector* shows that the following should have been installed by default.

ii  language-selector-common    0.165.4            all                Language selector for Ubuntu
ii  language-selector-gnome     0.165.4            all                Language selector for Ubuntu

sudo apt install --reinstall language-selector-common will likely do the trick. If not you may need to purge and then reinstall with

sudo apt-get purge language-selector-common be aware that this approach will remove both language-selector-common and language-selector-gnome so we have to reinstall both of them with

sudo apt-get install language-selector-common language-selector-gnome

Open Language support from the dash:

Click install/remove languages.

Scroll to the language you wish to install, tick the box and click apply changes.

Support for your chosen language will be installed:

Note that:

Now that you've installed the language in your system, each user (this means you) can select it as an option in text entry settings as shown below:

Hit the + button to bring up the menu as shown below:

Now you can select French as a text entry language.

You may wish to also check the keyboard layout chart.

Tested on Ubuntu 16.04