MX Linux Forum

Is there a way a smart person could 'down the road' create a script that allows an installer to select the language and load the appropriate locales for their situation?

That would be an unreasonable reinvention of the wheel, and attempting to guestimate "critical" locales is futile ~~ there are like 60 locales, so 60! possible permutations {skiddoo doesn't know how type math symbol "sixty factorial"}. You want English, I want Peruvian AND English (wait, is "Peruvian" even a language?), Richard wants Espanola AND Texican English AND a side-order of Norwegianish, mauser wants a pony...

Scroll back and note that I did present this as a post-intallation step. Your followthrough confirms that a suitably-motivated user can successfully apply the instructions I posted ~~ you could provide those instructions within a "tips" document, accessible via a desktop launcher.

Isn't there a risk for a system installed from such a tailored respin to be slightly inconsistent ? I mean, apt would think some packages are (fully) installed even though some of their files have been removed or purged

If manyroads has mentioned anything risky, I haven't noticed. You've used the word "purged" here but throughout what I've read in earlier posts, purge is just an option being passed to apt-get (IOW, apt "knows full well" the status of the affected packages).

@skidoo I suppose I could just pick the major Western languages (1 each for the locales) French, German, English, Italian, Russian (and hope that almost everyone could make sense of that) and then have a note in the readme telling them to use MX Tools to add a language of their preference.

That's 270 MB installed for the locales, right? If that's so, you won't gain that much on the ISO, since xz may compress those extremely well.

For example, you can install the 3.6 MB locales-all package, which contains all the locales precompiled so you don't have to sit and watch them get rebuilt over and over during package updates...very boring on older machines, BTW. They expand to 130 MB when installed, though. I would guess that xz does a similarly good job compressing your 270 MB for the ISO.

If you're looking for a good ISO hosting site, archive.org will host it for free, and even create a torrent for it automatically. Include some jpgs in the upload if you want to create a screenshot slideshow, like this: https://archive.org/details/MX18X64

List it under "Community Software".

In Gnome buster respin, I tested your minimal script. Background and pre-username was removed in lightdm. Is this supposed be in minimal?

manyroads wrote: Thu Jan 17, 2019 4:57 pm @skidoo I suppose I could just pick the major Western languages (1 each for the locales) French, German, English, Italian, Russian (and hope that almost everyone could make sense of that) and then have a note in the readme telling them to use MX Tools to add a language of their preference.

I'd change French for Spanish and leave out Italian.

Seriously, most of the world knows English or Spanish these days.

Eadwine Rose wrote: Fri Jan 18, 2019 4:07 am Seriously, most of the world knows English or Spanish these days.

Seriously do you have any figures that substantiate your "theory" ?

Haha, I knew a French speaker would take objection with this!

[ADDED: and this Forum has a good number of them]

cyrilus31 wrote: Fri Jan 18, 2019 5:09 am

Eadwine Rose wrote: Fri Jan 18, 2019 4:07 am Seriously, most of the world knows English or Spanish these days.

Seriously do you have any figures that substantiate your "theory" ?

If I take a look at the entire Dutch population, pretty much everyone under 60 and over 12 speaks and reads English without a problem.

asqwerth wrote: Fri Jan 18, 2019 5:19 am Haha, I knew a French speaker would take objection with this!

[ADDED: and this Forum has a good number of them]

It is easy enough to add, as said before I know they can read English! Spanish is just a much larger user base and if space has to be conserved, it is a logical choice.

Here is my proof, from https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr: "French is one of the very few languages spoken all over the world, ranked the sixth most widely spoken language after Mandarin Chinese (over a billion speakers), English, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic."

@Asqwerth: Not at all. I get by ok with english, spanish and a few others. It's not a matter of predominance, I honestly do not care but I can assure you that I many countries I've been, people can hardly speak english (let alone spanish) : Japan, China and of course France to name just a few. If I had to chose I don't know what I would do but I would think of it wisely and I would not make any definitive statement.