Chapter 6. Using the Ubuntu Installer If you selected a combination of language and country for which no locale is defined and there exist multiple locales for the language, then the installer will allow you to choose which of those locales you prefer as the default locale for the installed system$^{2}$. In all other cases a default locale will be selected based on the selected language and country. Any default locale selected as described in the previous paragraph will use UTF-8 as character en- coding. If you are installing at low priority, you will have the option of selecting additional locales, including so-called “legacy” locales$^{3}$, to be generated for the installed system; if you do, you will be asked which of the selected locales should be the default for the installed system. Keyboards are often tailored to the characters used in a language. Select a layout that conforms to the keyboard you are using, or select something close if the keyboard layout you want isn’t represented. Once the system installation is complete, you’ll be able to select a keyboard layout from a wider range of choices (run dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration as root after you have completed the installation). Move the highlight to the keyboard selection you desire and press Enter . Use the arrow keys to move the highlight — they are in the same place in all national language keyboard layouts, so they are independent of the keyboard configuration. When installing via the hd-media method, there will be a moment where you need to find and mount the Ubuntu Installer iso image in order to get the rest of the installation files. The component iso-scan does exactly this. At first, iso-scan automatically mounts all block devices (e.g. partitions) which have some known filesystem on them and sequentially searches for filenames ending with .iso (or .ISO for that mat- ter). Beware that the first attempt scans only files in the root directory and in the first level of subdi- rectories (i.e. it finds / whatever .iso , /data/ whatever .iso , but not /data/tmp/ whatever .iso ). After an iso image has been found, iso-scan checks its content to determine if the image is a valid Ubuntu iso image or not. In the former case we are done, in the latter iso-scan seeks for another image. In case the previous attempt to find an installer iso image fails, iso-scan will ask you whether you would like to perform a more thorough search. This pass doesn’t just look into the topmost directories, but really traverses whole filesystem. If iso-scan does not discover your installer iso image, reboot back to your original operating system and check if the image is named correctly (ending in .iso ), if it is placed on a filesystem recognizable by debian-installer , and if it is not corrupted (verify the checksum). Experienced Unix users could do this without rebooting on the second console. 2. At medium and low priority you can always select your preferred locale from those available for the selected language (if there’s more than one). 3. Legacy locales are locales which do not use UTF-8, but one of the older standards for character encoding such as ISO 8859-1 (used by West European languages) or EUC-JP (used by Japanese). 49 6.3.1.4. Looking for the Ubuntu Installer ISO Image 6.3.1.3. Choosing a Keyboard