Installing Japanese language support from command-line

Question

According to some questions, this is how it's done:

sudo apt-get install language-pack-[cod] language-pack-gnome-[cod] language-pack-[cod]-base language-pack-gnome-[cod]-base 

Where [cod] is the language code, in my case I want to install japanese so I tried jap, jp, jpn, and none of these packages were found. I also tried zh for chinese but that didn't work either :(

Solution

Note: This answer is now outdated and breaks systems, e.g. Lubuntu 18.04.1 LTS on a Dell Latitude D620, such that opening Fcitx and clicking on the keyboard crashes the computer. Please pay attention to the dates and operating system for which this answer may be valid. (For example, the link in this answer leads to Lucid documentation, an OS which has now reached end of life.) If you accidentally follow this answer for a different Ubuntu version, you may need to uninstall QT4 and GTK3 packages. For example,

sudo apt purge fcitx-frontend-gtk3 fcitx-frontend-qt4 fcitx-frontend-qt5 kde-config-fcitx

followed by

sudo apt autoremove

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Try "ja"

sudo apt-get install language-pack-ja language-pack-gnome-ja language-pack-ja-base language-pack-gnome-ja-base

You might want to check out the language support metapackages as well.

Edit:

A convenient way to do the latter is to run:

sudo apt-get install $(check-language-support)

Comments

[Aaron Bramson]

I tried lots of advice to install Japanese fonts on my Ubuntu on Windows setup, and this is (almost) the only thing that actually worked (and both things were necessary).