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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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