How to verify if the Language is installed

Question

Is there some command for Redhat Linux that can tell me whether the Arabic Language is installed on Redhat 5.6 Server.

Answer 1

It's not 100% reliable, but:

$ rpm -q fonts-arabic

The hole here is that you could have the fonts installed, but not everything else you need to make Arabic text work in programs. You could also check for the fribidi package to improve the chance of your guess being correct.

If you want to do this in a shell script, I'd modify it slightly:

if rpm -q --quiet fonts-arabic ; then ...

That way you don't have to redirect noise out to /dev/null.

Answer 2

add, remove and change supported languages using the Package Manager. The Package Manager can be accessed from the system menu by clicking Applications => Add/Remove Software.

In the first tab you can view the application categories among which is Languages from which you can select the languages you wish to support.

language that is installed will be already checked and if you want to install it check the box. Please select only the languages you wish to use as this can save you a significant amount of disk space. The language selection feature in the Package Manager is illustrated below. Some languages have optional packages which you can select and install.

Answer 3

Since the language come as a meta package,

You could first verify the package name with yum grouplist, then check if that is installed with yum list installed | grep XXX

Another stupid way to check this,

%> export LANG=XXX; export LANGUAGE=$LANG;
%> ls some_file_does_not_exist

And you gonna receive an error message in the desired language, if the language pack is installed.

Answer 4

You can also try:

$ ls -lah /usr/share/locale/

On my system, Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.35-2 x86_64 GNU/Linux ,it's

...
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 4.0K Dec 23 15:22 en_US
...
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root   17 Dec 30 17:45 locale.alias -> /etc/locale.alias
...

And you can try to grep the language you're interested in.