Re: Boot floppies in Spanish

[Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk>]

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On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:

> > The variable definitions can be put in another script, and..
> > =2E dinstall.$LANG. That way it should be possible to include
> > more than one language in a boot disk.
> 
> This is assuming there is space in the root filesystem. That doesn't mean
> space on the floppy, but space in the 1.44MB uncompressed root filesystem
> that is contained in root.bin . You can't make that larger without
> removing the capability to install on 4MB systems.

Since they're text, they will compress well - so if you compress them on
the ramdisk itself, then source them using something like this:

eval `gunzip < blah`

This would be the best option to keep it working on low-memory systems
(lessens amount we need on the ramdisk).

Remember also that for this method, you need first to ask the user what
language they want to use:-

LANG_NAMES=""
eval `zcat /locale/* | grep ^LANG_NAMES=`

Then have each script start with something like:

LANG_NAMES="${LANG_NAMES}en-English-Select this for English:"

You end up with a long variable like:-

LANG_NAMES="en-English-Select this for English:xx-abc-YYZZ", etc.

Which you can split at the ":"'s for each individual item. The first word
is the (file)name of the language (ISO), the second the short name, and
the third the "select for blah item in that language".

When you have a selection, like "en" into the variable lang, you then do:-

eval `zcat /locale/${lang}`

Which sets up all the other shell variables for you.
you could also enclose the LANGNAMES=... in a never-happening if, like:-

if test "" = "x"; then
LANG_NAMES="xxxxx"
fi

In order to stop it getting mucked up the second time you source the same 
file.

- -- 
Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk>			http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/
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