Hello,
the attached patch to the livecd buildscripts simplifies the process of console configuration by guessing the screen font based on the user's locale. I have not implemented automatic selection of keymap because even for the same locale, different people may have different preferences (but I have a table for frequently used keymaps in most locales).
Now I can boot linux from the Live CD as follows:
linux LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R KEYMAP=ru-ms TZ=Asia/Yekaterinburg UTC=1
and automatically get proper regional settings upon login. (Well, I also have to edit xorg.conf). In some locales, the result is different from the contents of template /etc/sysconfig/console file but still correct AFAIK.
I have not done the SVN commit yet. Is this feature wanted by anyone else?
The following locales are removed from the list of supported ones:
* UTF-8 based locales. Reason: many applications (and most notably the ncurses library) are compiled with known wrong options.
Some time ago I heard in #lfs-support: "but it just works for me in en_GB.UTF-8!". This Live CD doesn't work correctly in ru_RU.UTF-8. The "it works" statement can be heard only from people that speak only English and really use pure ASCII. In en_GB.UTF-8, bugs are in fact the same, but invisible to such people.
* Locales based on other multibyte character sets, i.e. when the "locale ctype-mb-cur-max" command prints a number greater than 1. Same reason as above, plus there are no userspace programs and fonts on the CD necessary to type and see text in such locales.
* Arabic and Hebrew locales. Reason: right-to-left writing direction, no working text editor, no good terminal.
* Locales that use 8-bit character sets not supported by the "kbd" package, e.g. ISO-8859-14 or GEORGIAN-PS.
* Turkish locale. Reason: in this locale, "I" is not the uppercase version of "i" (the correct uppercase version is "Ä"). Some programs may break because of this. If I am a pessimist here and the CD is in fact usable enough in the tr_TR.ISO-8859-9 locale, please correct me.
-- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/livecd FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
