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Author: Lukasz Jastrzebski
Date:  
To: dynebolic mailinglist
Subject: [dyne:bolic] dyne:bolic - localisation
Hi again!

As I wrote some time ago, I made few simple and working (but sucking a
lot) steps towards localisation of d:b 2.5.2. If someone needs it,
here it goes:

1. X
First thing i did was setting language CONFIGURE in XFCE. Both: works
in 100%, and sucks a lot due to unfinished translations. Also console
was left unchanged, and so was the terminal emulators.

2. Spoiling the console
As many things in d:b it works only under root's account (cause of
permissions? how to fix it? chmoding half of distro seems not to be
the good way, but maybe its my own issue only - the X does not start
under other logins too). I made all changes within /root/.zshenv
script file, it goes like this:

export LC_CTYPE="pl_PL"
export LC_NUMERIC="pl_PL"
export LC_TIME="pl_PL"
export LC_COLLATE="pl_PL"
export LC_MONETARY="pl_PL"
export LC_MESSAGES="C"
export LC_PAPER="pl_PL"
export LC_NAME="pl_PL"
export LC_ADDRESS="pl_PL"
export LC_TELEPHONE="pl_PL"
export LC_MEASUREMENT="pl_PL"
export LC_IDENTIFICATION="pl_PL"
export LANG="polish"
export KEYB="pl"

setfont lat2-16 -m 8859-2
loadkeys pl2

echo " :) setup complete"


~/.zshenv is one of many files executed automatically while logging
into zsh. There are similar startup files in many apps.
3. Spoiling it in custom way
First:
How to know possibilities of what to put in place of "pl_PL" or
"polish" in all this lines above?
# locale -a | less
and to know the actual state?
# locale
>Some other things?

The LC_ALL variable, when set, overrides all other LC_* with new value.
Keyboard layouts (via loadkeys) are in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps
Fonts (for console) are within /usr/share/kbd/consolefonts
The -m option in setfont sets encoding, not always needed.
I set MESSAGES="C" - this is for everything to speak English to me.
ROX has its interface translated into Polish in about 30%, its
unusable - so I hacked it this way.

4. Back to X
Next thing was the XTerm (don't like default mrxvt, both of them can
be tuned via config files as well). There was no Polish letters with
default settings.
Changing font or encoding is simple: I added alt-t to keybindings with
following command:
xterm -fn -*-clean-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-2
The command was not working when invoked in terminal, but it works
while keybinded. I used xfontsel to search fonts in X - to find a
"good" font. Again - not all fonts work well with XTerm. Standard is
"fixed". There are some options to set up freefont fonts and
antialiasing/hinting, but nothing can be better than "clean" for me.
However - the xfontsel points into subset of fonts, so you can set
different parameters to see if there is a font, that works fine for
you. You can eg. demand encoding only. Or height. Or romans from Sun.

Manpages worth reading ICE: zsh, loadkeys, setfont, locale, xterm (or
mrxvt), xfontsel.

I never was able to work with Unicode under console and X. Emacs was
yelling at me, zsh was grumbling. Any clues?

Cheers,
Luke