At the end of the past week Microsoft made available for download the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) language packs for Windows Server 2008. The packages enable customers to implement multilingual graphical user interfaces into the Redmond company's latest Windows server operating system. A total of 12 packages are now up for grabs straight from Microsoft delivering support for a variety of languages. The smallest MUI pack is just 172.0 MB with all the resources weighing in at 4,7 GB.

"Multilingual User Interface Language Packs (Windows Server Language Packs) enable a multilingual user interface in a Windows Server 2008 environment. Adding one or more language packs to a Windows Server 2008 image enables one or more languages in the installed Windows Server operating system, allowing corporations to deploy the same Windows Server 2008 image worldwide while still providing localized user interfaces," Microsoft revealed in the overview of the Windows Server 2008 Multilingual User Interface language packs.

The MUI packages are designed to integrate will all the editions of Windows Server 2008 and offer support for 32-bit, 64-bit and Itanium-based systems require Itanium (ia64) architectures. Microsoft has delivered the following language packs for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008: English, German, Japanese, French, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Russian, Portuguese (Portugal), Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Turkish, Czech, Hungarian, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Hebrew, Greek, Thai, Ukrainian, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian Latin, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian.

As far as the Itanium (ia64) language packs are concerned, support is limited to English, German, Japanese, French, Chinese Simplified and Korean. "Each language pack is a .cab file. The language pack .cab files are grouped into .img image download files," Microsoft added. Because of the alignment between Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, the MUI documentation for the Windows client also applies to the server operating system.

The Windows Server 2008 Multilingual User Interface Language Packs are available for download here.