Dell Vostro 3560 doesn't allow to set menu language other than en

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

What the hell?! So I have to yell nonstop for this to remain open?

Hi,

Apologies for that. Launchpad automatically closes them out after 15 days, it's no big deal to re-open as you did.

Can you tell me a bit more? If I understand this, you have a Vostro 3560 that you bought from Dell pre-installed with Ubuntu. Is that correct?

Just to verify, what version of Ubuntu is on your system?

Where are you located, and where did you purchase it? What language are you trying to use?

I would, as an initial guess, say that you're just missing the right language pack. But let me know more and I'll try to sort it out for you.

As for your other comment, Dell has some support info somewhere on their site (what do you get when you try searching by your Service Tag number on support.dell.com? We have no control, however, over where Dell puts their support info, though.

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Needs information' state without activity for the last 15 days.

Hi!

I finally got again at the computer in question. Regarding your questions - yes, it is Dell with preloaded Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot).

I bought it from here:
http://www.dateks.lv/en/cenas/3/69585_dell_vostro_3560_silver_15_6_2_5ghz_4gb_500gb_linux.php

And the language I'm trying to use is Latvian and I have it marked for installation in the language selector, but the entry is grayed out in the selection dialog, so I can't actually set it and use. Could it be because of some dell settings package? It was like that with the default search engine in firefox - it was set to yahoo and every time firefox was restarted it reset it back to yahoo even if I try to set it to something else.

Dell support page is completely useless even with the service key - it has info only about the other operating system and even downloads are only for it. I found that there is Dell project on launchpad I'm not sure if they are the ones responsible for preparing Ubuntu for the laptop, but at least the maintainer of Dell specific wireless driver package is listed in that project:
https://launchpad.net/dell

Actually I have an issue also with the wireless for this laptop - it looks like its driver package prevents it from upgrade to Precise (12.04) or higher, because it is only for kernel 3.0:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=688823

And on top of that bluethooth doesn't work for it and also wireless got working only after a lot of fiddling around with it and with router settings (though at the end it started to work with the same initial configuration without an obvious reason).

For some reason after adding third party software repository in the sources list update manager suddenly offers to upgrade to 12.04.1, but when trying to do it it aborts because of missing signature. There seems to be a repo for Precise, but without any packages in it:
http://dell.archive.canonical.com/dists/precise-dell/

For one, don't upgrade... it's probably being held back for those reasons you mention... and please don't yet try a full install of 12.04 or 12.10. Currently, the only certified version for that machine is the pre-installed version of 11.10 that you already have.

I will say that unofficially, I think 12.04 will work on the machine, however, that is completely unofficial and unsupported and not recommended at this time. I haven't looked at the test results in depth, so I honestly don't know if they're any good or not, but the number of pass vs fail tests seem to indicate that it will be good once we have had time to do a proper review.

As for installing Latvian, I'm going to pass this along to the team that handles the pre-install images and see if anyone can offer a suggestion for this issue. Hopefully they can respond soon.

Regarding Latvian being "grayed out" in the language selector's (also called "Language Support") selection dialog, and therefore apparently disabled:

Have you tried dragging Latvian and to the top of the list of Languages? This may 'ungray' it. Then, you can click the "Apply System Wide" button and on the next restart, it should be the default desktop language.

Hi redan2,

So there are some answers for you... and if I may, could I ask you for your assistance in trying something out?

First, to summarize the Language issue Kyle mentions, if you drag Latvian to the top of the list, click "Apply System Wide" then log out and back in, your system should now be using the Latvian language pack.

Can you please try this and if not, let me know and I'll help you file a bug for the language pack problem

Now, regarding Firefox. We ship a package called called 'yahoo-browser-defaults' in the 11.10 Dell Pre-install image that is likely the culprit behind your issue in saving the search settings. Could you please do the following:

1: Close down any Firefox windows
2: Open a terminal and use this command:

# sudo apt-get remove yahoo-browser-defaults

3: restart Firefox and try to set your default search and homepage again
4: Close and restart firefox and verify that they no longer revert back to Yahoo.

Can you please let me also know what the outcome of the Firefox suggestion is? If this does not fix your problem then we may have another issue to look at and I'll help you get a bug filed for that.

Thanks a lot! Please try this as soon as you can and let me know what happens :)
Jeff

See previous message regarding some things to try to solve your problems.

Thank you for the answers!

Dragging the desired language to the top works indeed. And after the fact I'm reading that there are actually written instructions saying to do exactly that below the language list.

I already figured out about 'yahoo-browser-defaults' and followed those steps and it worked, except for the search in firefox address bar, it still used yahoo, had to change it manually in about:config.

So the only remaining issue is a flaky Broadcom BT+WiFi chip support (wireless seems to be working stably now after initial hiccups) which also holds back distro upgrade. Since I'm not using this laptop personally myself I don't want to tinker with it too much and I'm fine with leaving it at 11.10 for now.

Thanks Jeff, I have a Dell 3450 laptop with ubuntu 11.10 installed, as described, the firefox home page was set to yahoo and could not be reset, nor would it save tabs on restart. I spend several days hunting down sysprefs.js which was a partial fix, then a full re-install of firefox still resulted in its homepage being set to yahoo. I thought malware must be responsible and wasted several days on this problem, so it now turns out that dell deliberately installed it on the laptop without saying anything to the customer. Own goals for yahoo and dell then.