installation of locales (particularly CJK locales) by the installer / tasksel
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
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
manually treak the configuration files (such as firefox) so that it can look
up the correct fonts and print Chinese correctly)
manually treak the X windows configuration files so that it is aware of the
existance of SCIM
These steps would require considerable knowledge of Linux and one simply
CANNOT reasonbly expect a Linux newbie (even if he is already a computer
expert) to be able to perform all these steps.
Also these steps could have been easily automated by tasksel in the
installer, which can ask the locales to include in the operating system
straight on the next screen after asking what software to install, as in
what has been done in Anaconda in Fedora. Then tasksel can install and
configure all the extra necessary packages to accomodate DISPLAYING,
PRINTING and INPUT requirements of ALL of the selected locales AUTOMATICALLY
and in a PAINLESS way.
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.
Mark
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Become a fitness fanatic @ http://xtramsn.co.nz/health
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