Re: Language support
> > This was discussed a couple of months ago. The problem is that the data
> > for all the languages doesnt fit on the disk, therefore you have to make
> > specific boot-images for each language. The proposal long ago was to
> > integrate the selection of keyboard and suggest the aproriate language.
>
> 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 ...
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
But what then? All languages included or dynamic loaded ?
MfG,
Hartmut
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