Yankee Imperialism!

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03-30-2003, 04:51 PM
fingers99

Yankee Imperialism!

Two or 3 not unrelated issues here:

How do I get Italian as the default keyboard mapping? OK, I can do it easily enough for X sessions in Kde, but it leaves me floundering about in console sessions as, no matter what I do (keymap-install appears to have no effect whatsoever, although I'm not 100% sure I understand the man page) I end up with the us keymappings (OK, so my mother tongue is English -- although not American English) and I have an Italian keyboard.

Knoppix/Debian is the only Linux I've come across which refuses to print (I mean, on screen) non standard ascii characters: for example, I have a lot of oggs by a Macedonian band called Koçani (that's c cedilla) Orkestar: for reasons I can't grok, Although the file name shows correctly (maybe Kde is handing that) XMMS shows the band as Koani Orkestar! Can I fix this?

Note to developers: most of the English speaking world does *not* speak American English or use American imperial measurements or use American keyboards. WTF are these the defaults?
03-30-2003, 05:43 PM
Henk Poley

Re: Yankee Imperialism!

Quote:

Originally Posted by fingers99

How do I get Italian as the default keyboard mapping?

Press F2 at the Knoppix bootprompt, enter "knoppix lang=it". See the cheatcode docs. Hope this helps.

Quote:

Knoppix/Debian is the only Linux I've come across which refuses to print (I mean, on screen) non standard ascii characters: for example, I have a lot of oggs by a Macedonian band called Koçani (that's c cedilla) Orkestar: for reasons I can't grok, Although the file name shows correctly (maybe Kde is handing that) XMMS shows the band as Koani Orkestar! Can I fix this?

The c cedille is an upper ASCII code (above code 126), about every country or district uses it's own upper ASCII table... So I guess you were just lucky before. Or you set your locale to Italy in the installation.

The lang=it cheatcode should fix this, I hope.

Quote:

Note to developers: most of the English speaking world does *not* speak American English or use American imperial measurements or use American keyboards. WTF are these the defaults?

Uhm, you should really check out who made this 'distro' or you would have said "imperial germans" instead ;-)

I hope that the lang=it option fixes your problem. If most people in Italy use Italian keyboards insteads of US ones you have big chances it will.
03-30-2003, 06:09 PM
rickenbacherus

Re: Yankee Imperialism!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Henk Poley

Uhm, you should really check out who made this 'distro' or you would have said "imperial germans" instead ;-)

damn karma <chuckle> :D
03-30-2003, 08:11 PM
fingers99

Quote:

Press F2 at the Knoppix bootprompt, enter "knoppix lang=it". See the cheatcode docs. Hope this helps.

Well, I can see that it'd work from the CD, but from a hard drive install?

Quote:

Uhm, you should really check out who made this 'distro' or you would have said "imperial germans" instead

Ah, but it's in the nature of Imperialism to corrupt all and to lead to an internalisation of (foreign) values: I'm sure that there are Kde, OpenOfficeOrg and Knoppix developers who really think that we use US paper sizes, US keyboards, and such. We don't, and we won't ;-)

As for the Germans, my only major beef is that they still have not paid the Roma any reparations: 50+ years is a little too long to have to wait!
03-30-2003, 08:19 PM
rickenbacherus

Quote:

Originally Posted by fingers99

Quote:

Press F2 at the Knoppix bootprompt, enter "knoppix lang=it". See the cheatcode docs. Hope this helps.

Well, I can see that it'd work from the CD, but from a hard drive install?

Yes it works. That's why you need to ensure that everything is as you wish it to be with the bootable cd before installing it.

Quote:

Ah, but it's in the nature of Imperialism to corrupt all and to lead to an internalisation of (foreign) values: I'm sure that there are Kde, OpenOfficeOrg and Knoppix developers who really think that we use US paper sizes, US keyboards, and such. We don't, and we won't ;-)

bah! - now had you said capitalism instead of imperialism well maybe........ :D
03-30-2003, 08:31 PM
Henk Poley

Quote:

Originally Posted by fingers99

Quote:

Press F2 at the Knoppix bootprompt, enter "knoppix lang=it". See the cheatcode docs. Hope this helps.

Well, I can see that it'd work from the CD, but from a hard drive install?

A Knoppix HDD install will contain the same settings as you booted with. So the *easy* way would be be to do a reinstall. You could also check the bootscripts used by knoppix (they are in /KNOPPIX on the CD?) and see if you can decipher what lang=it does and add that to your startup scripts (don't ask me where...)

Quote:

Quote:

Uhm, you should really check out who made this 'distro' or you would have said "imperial germans" instead

Ah, but it's in the nature of Imperialism to corrupt all and to lead to an internalisation of (foreign) values: I'm sure that there are Kde, OpenOfficeOrg and Knoppix developers who really think that we use US paper sizes, US keyboards, and such. We don't, and we won't ;-)

AFAIK both KDE and OpenOffice were from the beginning german projects ;-)

"US papersizes" have been business standard in Europe since about 1880 or something, "letter" for example is the format that would fit into a typewriter. *Everybody* uses that... I know that's probably your problem. But would you want to calc to and from foreign standards if you want to buy paper for your printer? I think I'm happy with "A4".

Americans still measure pre-napoleonistic measures like inches and gallons etc. so indeed you should rather cry than laugh.
03-30-2003, 11:00 PM
fingers99

Quote:

A Knoppix HDD install will contain the same settings as you booted with. So the *easy* way would be be to do a reinstall. You could also check the bootscripts used by knoppix (they are in /KNOPPIX on the CD?) and see if you can decipher what lang=it does and add that to your startup scripts (don't ask me where...)

I'll give that a go next weekend. Or someone could tell me where it's hardcoded so I can try some judicious editing. :cry:

You really make my point for me with the paper sizes and such: in the UK we've not used (and it's been just about impossible to buy) letter for 30 years or so, and it's actually illegal to sell stuff by imperial weights (although legal to sell by metric and imperial). Oz and NZ use metric. Only US and Canada still use "letter". Drives me nuts with US dictionaries, badly translated German(!) page descriptions (what's wrong with "odd" and "even" FCS?) and so on.