spanish option for babel

Question

I recently updated my Miktex 2.9 and when I tried to compile my files I get the following error, which I didn't have before:

package babel error: unknown option spanish. Either you misspelled it or the language definition file spanish.ldf was not found.

This is a MWE:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[explicit]{titlesec}
\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames]{pstricks}
\usepackage{amsfonts,amssymb,amsmath,mathrsfs,enumerate,epsfig,fullpage,pst-grad,pst-plot}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\begin{document} Esta es una prueba. \end{document}

Answer 1

The organization of babel has changed. The languages has been separated into separate distribution packages and are now independently maintained. In MiKTeX you have to install babel-spanish to get babel's spanish.

Related: Package babel Error: Unknown option `francais'

Answer 2

I was looking for an answer at this related or duplicate question.

For me on different Ubuntu derivates, this did the trick:

sudo apt-get install texlive-lang-spanish %in my case -german

               ^{(don't forget the install as in egreg's comment where I have this from)}

For Fedora/Debian please use

sudo dnf install texlive-babel-spanish %in my case -german

Of course, you can replace spanish/german with your needed language, dutch, francais or another one.

Edit/Update:

Apparently, as stated in this answer, these packages have become obsolete; texlive-lang-european should be installed now instead:

sudo apt-get install texlive-lang-european

^{Fore a more technical explanation see here}