I was wondering how I might install Greek (my native language) on SUSE 1.3. In the past, it was an adventure.

I tried the X11 configuration, which has a panel about the keyboard. I added the Greek keyboard layout and...

I now have Greek in all applications (I have tried so far!)...

Impressed once more...each day that passes, there are fewer reasons to stay with Windows!

Before doing that, I clicked on a torrent (a language pack for SUSE 1.3), and it started downloading immediately through KTorrent. I did not let the download go on, since I already have the appropriate layout and fonts...but it was impressive. No need to download anything from my part.

It is most definitely true for Estonian. There are only around 1M people in the world who speak the language but pretty much every (half)official KDE application is in Estonian. I once tried the official MS translation of XP Pro and that was the worst experience I've ever had. Wording was all messed up and half the time things were still in English.

How do you do that? (No derailing intended )

On the Mac you can have a little flag put into the menu bar which you click for a list of all your installed keyboard configurations. In Windows you can have pretty much the same thing in the taskbar (though it seems to be letters, not flags, and when you first install Windows if you specify a non-American keyboard it always seems to assume that you want the American keyboard configuration installed as well, at least for UK keyboards).

That all said, it bothers me that I have the UK flag in my menu bar¹ all the time. I feel like the computer assumes that if I can be bothered to tell it what country I live in then I'm obviously a flag waving nationalist.

¹ the flag thingy has additional functions other than swapping language & keyboard layout.

There's a gnome panel applet. I just can't remember what its called at the moment (on my mac right now).

I am not interested in translations, because they suck :-) (English terms are much more natural in this domain). But the problem in past years was with fonts and with X11 support for input. The system I have now behaves exactly like Windows: alt+shift changes language.

Since I am not playing games that much, I use Linux more these days; it's surprisingly good.

Silly gentoo ricers. *

Today I tried Kubuntu and I must say, as far as languages and keyboard layouts go, everything looks good. But Windows in Slovenian is good too, so I cant say nothing against Windows...

_{* Sorry, I just had to say it once... I just had to know what the feeling is like. It will never happen again. I promise!}

Microsoft products are usually quite well translated on most markets, since reportedly (this from a fellow who worked at MS finland) Microsoft translates their programs in-house with full source builds instead of the more common method of sending string lists to localisation companies. Of course if your language is insignificant enough to make Microsoft choose to outsource their localisation then I guess it would suck to be you.

Control Center -> Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Layouts. Dvorak ftw!
I use skim (scim) for chinese and japanese input.

I am confused with English computer terms translated to my native language; English feels much more natural to me in this domain; and some terms are really funny when translated.

I hate it when Windows "recognizes" one of the installed input languages (say, German or Dutch) and just assumes that this means that I have unplugged my US keyboard and plugged in my German or Dutch one. I only ever use one keyboard on my machine, and the keyboard layout NEVER changes. How hard can that be? Seriously, US-International has everything I need, switching keybord layouts is just silly (at least for the 4 languages I use - if I needed Chinese or Thai for example, things might be different). Deleting all keyboard layouts except US-Intl. is one of the first things I always do right after installing windows.

Oh, and last time I checked, the German translations for KDE were beyond horrible - so bad that I couldn't even make out what the hell they meant.