[ILUG] Debian, KDE and translations

[Niall Walsh]

So I boot up a preview release of Kanotix (basically debian unstable on a 
bootable disc) with a new cheatcode (it's arrival 
primarily based on Knoppix's willingness to go with it for Cebit) unionfs.   
Booting with unionfs means that a copy-on-write union is made in the ramdisk 
so you can install away (first step is apt-get update) and then (not) watch it 
dissappear when you reboot.

Of course I then went and used cp and unionctl to move the ramdisk based union 
onto a partition, rebooted and remounted it and thought what will I try and 
do now (apart from trying to hack in a more useful cheatcode cause that means 
remastering the compressed image, I've since started at that).

So I thought I'd try and add kde-i18n-ga (I'd already installed a couple of 
packages after my apt-get update) and what do I find?  No kde-i18n-ga packages 
on kde.org for 3.3.2 :-(   All I can find with google seems to be mandrake 
rpms.  So I grabbed those, ran them through alien and dpkg -i and they were 
installed!  Now all I had to do was figure out how to test them!

So I dropped to init 3, edited /etc/sysconfig/i18n to have LANG="ga_IE at euro" 
and LANGUAGE="ga" and gave it an init 5 .... and lots of irish appeared!   
Obviously not everything is in Irish, but quite a bit ... enough to get me 
praying I'm picking the right things most of the time!

Not sure all this adds too much to the conversation, other then a little guide 
to one very perverse way of seeing a cupla focal and a sideways view at the 
latest craze sweeping (some) linux livecds!

Niall

p.s. the date this email has been sent is purely coincidental with any 
amusement or confusion you may derive from it :-)