Re: Language support
On Tue, Nov 16, 1999 at 08:37:54AM +0100, Hartmut Koptein wrote:
> > Hmm... What data is needed?
> >
> > 1. Messages for dbootstrap. At the moment we have 14 languages. Every
> > language is about 32K in trm format what gives us about 470K (too much!).
> > But if we compress it's only 160K.
> >
> > 2. We do not need any keyboard map here (almost everywhere only up and down
> > arrows and enter keys are used + English words (like system name etc))
> >
> > 3. We do need fonts to display those messages. 12 of them are using latin
> > characters of some kind plus Russian that uses KOI8-R, plus Japanese that
> > uses something quite special :). LatArCyrHeb covers 13 languages, what
> > gives us 4K plus a couple of Ks for acms (that are needed!). I do not
> > know how large Japanese fonts are.
> >
> > That's all. This gives 170K without Japanese stuff. Is it too much? I heard
> > there were successful experiments with 2,8M images. These are certainly
> > suitable for CD booting. We must provide multilanguage installation in this
> > case, though we may want to provide a special image (root disk??) for every
> > supported language.
>
> So we need 14 versions of boot-floppies for each architecture? Not nice ...
Sorry, I do not quite catch your point: where I said it's needed 14 disks? We do
need one disk for each architechture! We just have to copy additional 170K to
each, and these 170K allow us to select a language.
> For a floppy based setup only C is ok, but for CDRom we should support all
> 14 languages. CD into the cdrom, reset (Bios changes), reset, autoboot and
> the first table is then:
>
>
> -------------------------
> | English |
> | Franch |
> | Deutsch |
> | ... |
> ------------------------- Entries in there native language
I am not sure that everything will work this way. That's why I asked (in other
message) how the things get loaded. There are two scenarios:
-- current. right after loading syslinux presents the user with a possibility
to specify a set of additional parameters for the kernel. at the same time,
the user may browse additional information using F1-F10. In this case, we
just *have* to provide one image for every language, as, if I understand
correctly, syslinux is not localizable.
-- a new one. :) syslinux (or other boot loader) loads default kernel without
waiting for *any* user input. right after that the user is presented with
a menu of possible languages (localized environments), and then she tries
to configure her kernel (by adding necessary modules).
UNFORTUNATELY, I do not know whether this is ever possible. I believe
there are devices for which drivers should be compiled-in.
> But what then? All languages included or dynamic loaded ?
Included and dynamic loaded. :)
--
Mike
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