Re: i18n'd boot-floppies ?
On Sat, Apr 29, 2000 at 01:00:27PM -0400, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> Michael, I note that you've been busily hacking away at the language
> chooser. Is it ready to be mainstreamed?
No.
> The i386 root disk, at least, and in fact any architecture which has
> functioning library reduction code, does have room for all the
> translated dbootstrap messages. However, many architectures such as
> powerpc, I think, do not have room.
Well, the way I currently do that is going to make use of an UTF-8 capable
console (thanks, Edmundo! :). Such a beast exists (bterm in utilities/bogl
directory) and it works (good enough for allowing dbootstrap show everything
using slang-based interface). There are three issues here:
-- a kernel supporting framebuffer
-- hacked versions of newt and slang
-- a font
The latter is the worst! I do not have estimates for a font that contains only
those characters that are used by all texts in dbootstrap program. Any font
that have Japanese/Chinese/Korean support, has rather unreasonable size. :)
(I have two here: one is 1,7M, another -- 2,4M; uncompressed)
BTW, one of the way for saving the disk space is static linking... As I
already noted in on my recent messages, dbootstrap statically linked with newt
and slang is only 60K larger than the one dynamically linked. And (what to my
mind is very nice) it does not depend on libm any more.
> I would very much like to see i18n'd root disk.
Me too!
> Now thinking about i18n in general, there are a number of issues:
>
> - rescue disk -- syslinux messages (i386 at least)
syslinux does not allow to have same messages in different languages! So
should we want to allow a non-English speaker see syslinux messages in her
own language, we have (!) to create a localized version of rescue disk.
> - root disk -- dbootstrap msgs, addressed by your work
It's not ready for use. Again, I rely on a very specific things: a framebuffer
capable kernel and dbootstrap running under bterm.
> - base -- already i18n'd I think
I know nothing about it.
> - documentation -- already i18n'd
Well, Russian variant is not up-to-date. I believe that other documentation
may be not up-to-date as well.
> What's the story with the rescue disk?
To my mind, a reasonable approach is to have English language speaking rescue
disk (I mean syslinux messages). If user does not need to to do anything
special those messages are of no use for her. (If I understand correctly,
this is the only thing on rescue disk, no?)
> Are we planning on building one rescue disk for each language supported?
No! I want to avoid this!
> Are there i18n issues on non-i386 platforms?
I do not have access to any non-i386 computers, so I know nothing about that.
--
Mike
Reply to: