More support European users in Debian
After finishing the latest version of the German-specific HOWTO, I can
give some details for a better support of European users of Linux. If
somebody has more information, I would be more than happy to include them
in the next version of the HOWTO. Please forgive me that my knowledge is
limited to iso-8859-1.
The country-specific configuration can be structured as follows:
Applications
POSIX conforming
non conforming
System
Keymaping (console)
Softfont (console)
Timezones
XFree86
Textfiles
Papersizes
Character encodings (optionally)
dictionaries
Printer Setup
To configure the "POSIX conforming" applications, we need a little tool
to present a list of all countries for which locale-settings are available
("ls /usr/share/locale"). The user chooses his country from this list -
and the tool sets the environment-variable "LANG" to the appropreciate
value. The "Linux Locale mini-HOWTO explains everything about this
setting.
My suggestion would be to try to derive most of the rest of the
country-specific configuration from the LANG-variable. So if we set this
variable very early in the setup process every setup-script would be able
to make at least good guesses (and ask the user about them).
For the LANG-variable a place to affect every shell/programm would be
the holy "/etc/init.d/boot". Simple and effective.
The "non conforming" applications (e.g. "emacs") only need slight
modifications to their configuration file. A (incomplete?) summary of
these modifications is at the end of this e-mail. Package maintainers,
please read it.
"loadkeys" and "softfont" already have setup-tools, but they are somewhat
to spartanic: instead of displaying the filenames in
/usr/lib/kbd/keytables they should display the associated country names.
The timezone is the big exception because it can't be determined by LANG
in many common cases. But this is no problem because every user knows the
capitol of the local country.
I mention the character encoding for text-files because I use the aliases
"recode ibmpc:lat1" to convert DOS-texts. That's purely optional.
The printer setup depends on the capabilities and configuration of it:
does it handle the iso-8859-1 character set (and is it configured to use
it [-> conflicts with DOS])?
-Winfried
"readline" and friends
Config file: ~/.inputrc
set meta-flag on
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on
"ytalk" requires a patch
"selection" can't deal with 8bit properly (superceeded by gpm anyways)
"dosemu"
Config files: ~/.dosrc and /etc/dosemu.conf
keyboard { layout de-latin1 keybint on rawkeyboard on }
X { updatefreq 8 title `DOS in a BOX' icon_name `xdos' keycode }
"emacs"
Config files: /usr/lib/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.el,
~/.emacs and /usr/lib/emacs/site-lisp/default.el
(set-input-mode (car (current-input-mode))
(nth 1 (current-input-mode))
0)
(standard-display-european t)
"less"
Config files: ~/.bash_profile and /etc/profile
export LESSCHARSET=latin1
"pine"
Config files: ~/.pinerc and /etc/pine.conf
# character-set should reflect the capabilities of the display
# you have. Normal default is US-ASCII. Typical alternatives
# include ISO-8859-x, where x is a number between 1 and 9.
character-set=ISO-8859-1
"joe"
Config files: ~/.joerc and /etc/joe/joerc
-asis
"elm"
Config file: ~/.elm/elmrc
charset = iso-8859-1
displaycharset = iso-8859-1
textencoding = 8bit
"nn"
Config file: ~/.nn/init
set data-bits 8
"lynx"
Config files: ~/.lynxrc and /etc/lynx.cfg
CHARACTER_SET:ISO Latin 1
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