Re: installation of locales (particularly CJK locales) by the installer / tasksel

[Kenshi Muto <kmuto@debian.org>]

Hi,

At 3 Apr 05 01:18:15 GMT,
Tony Ma wrote:
> I have just tried the Sarge RC3 net installer.  It is very smooth, free of 
> glitch and straight forward.  However the only criticism I have is that 
> unlike the Fedora Anaconda installer, the Sarge RC3 installer does NOT ask 
> for installation of locales.  Therefore after installation, I have to take 
> the trouble to take the following tedious steps manually in order to restore 
> Chinese display, printing and input functions:
> 
> recreate the Chinese, Japanese and Korean locale by running dpkg-reconfigure 
> locales

I couldn't understand why you need to recreate Japanese and Korean
locales to just restore Chinese display.
And I dunno why you need to recreate Chinese locale. Did you install
Sarge with English language or serial console?

> use synaptics to install Chinese fonts and postscript converters to allow 
> display and printing of Asian characters
> Use synaptics to Install SCIM/IIIMF to allow input of Asian characters
> use synaptics to install appropriate locale packages of different programs, 
> such as kde, openoffice, firefox

Mm? All of you mentioned is about desktop.
When you choose 'desktop' package collection at 2nd stage and have
a network connectivity or full CD, you will have scim-chinese, chinput,
kde-i18n-zh*, xfonts-intl-chinese*, ttf-arphic-*, bg5ps, and
openoffice.org-l10n-*.

It's your business/choice if you installed without desktop selection.

> manually treak the configuration files (such as firefox) so that it can look 
> up the correct fonts and print Chinese correctly)

firefox isn't in a territory of d-i.
But if your major font is registed as Serif/Sans-serif on
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf or /etc/fonts/local.conf, you don't need to
configure them, I think.

> manually treak the X windows configuration files so that it is aware of the 
> existance of SCIM

"Configuring XIM needs by user's hand (or use language-env)" is one of
our known problem.
Although IMmodule is trend and XIM will go oboslete, I've an idea and
created sample implementation (im-switch, as same as Fedora) to choose
default XIM/IMmodule. Unfortunately it's too late to enter in Sarge,
so this is post-sarge feature.

> This feature is essential for future versions of debian installer, otherwise 
> people who also need non-English locales will be simply SCARED AWAY from 
> Debian before realizing its strengths.

We welcome any contributors who implement and work more better for
next release.

Thanks,
-- 
Kenshi Muto
kmuto@debian.org