Ubuntu

Cannot add swahili support

Asked by Mogens Dybæk Christensen

Had Ubuntu desktop 7.10, english language only. Then I installed all packages in Synaptic that matched "swahili", since this laptop is intended for a project in Tanzania. Got the spell checker in OpenOffice.org (still english menus) to check some swahili (the few words I know), but it is not possible to select the swahili language at login. sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales still only generates variants of english.
In the meantime the system has been upgraded to 8.04, but it did not help on this problem.
Got a hint, that I should edit /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local , but "sw_TZ.UTF-8 UTF-8" and similar guesses don't work.
I assume UTF-8 should be used, since I want users to see the same files independent of their language preference. And, as far as I know, swahili uses the same alphabet as english.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#1

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

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Mogens Dybæk Christensen (mdc) said : 		#2

Later i unintstalled all swahili packages (except OpenOffice) via Synaptic, then reselected swahili in "Language Support". I also selected danish, just to see if it worked.

Danish works fine, but swahili does not appear in the login->Options menu. So, I assume the swahili package is broken/incomplete.

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Jonathan Marsden (jmarsden) said : 		#3

This question is in some fashion a duplicate of LP#237130. I just commented there:

It seems that the language-pack-sw* packages (in Hardy at least) simply do not contain Swahili locale data. The file /var/lib/locales/supported.d/sw is an empty file (zero bytes long), unlike all the other files in that directory.

So, the locales package and the locale-gen program can't compile a Swahili locale. And by design, you can't persuade gdm to let you select a locale you don't have on your system, so the menus don't include it as a language choice.

It might be worth mailing <email address hidden> to see if the language pack maintenance team as a whole has any advice or suggestions?

Perhaps the folks you are sending out with a Ubuntu machine can actually help create the missing locale data themselves, and contribute it back to Ubuntu?

Jonathan

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