Booting the right Swiss locale / keyboard layout

[Pfau]

Hi all,
I have a simple question I could not answer on my own: what does the lang=ch cheatcode mean? Switzerland has 3 (4) national languages, and two keyboard layout variants (Swiss German and Swiss French), and lang=ch is not self explanatory...

I would like to boot Knoppix with the right language / locale / keyboard layout, in order to avoid changing it in the KDE control panel after the desktop has started. How could I do that?

My settings are:

Language: Italian
Country/Locale: Switzerland
Keyboard Layout: Swiss German (or CH variant de)

If I set lang=it at boot, KDE assumes an Italian locale (which in my case is wrong since for example I want Swiss Franc as currency instead of Euro). I also have problems with the keyboard layout since the Italian keyboard is different from the Swiss German one...

Every hint is really appreciated
Thanks a lot
Andrea

[kirol]

Most "cheatcodes" are handled by the /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig script.
Here's the relevant section for "lang=ch":

# Swiss version (basically de with some modifications)
ch)
LANGUAGE="de"
COUNTRY="ch"
LANG="de_CH"
KEYTABLE="sg-latin1"
XKEYBOARD="ch"
KDEKEYBOARD="ch"
CHARSET="iso8859-15"
# Additional KDE Keyboards
KDEKEYBOARDS="de,us,fr"
TZ="Europe/Zurich"
;;

(note that I am looking at the 5.0 DVD).

The problem with knoppix (and to be fair other live CD's) is trying to cover too many notions with a single keyword (localisation of messages, keyboard layout, timezone...). Once installed to HD, debian allows you to tune every one of those aspects. With the CD, your best bet is to choose the code that offers you the best support for your keyboard, then adjust the rest if needed - exactly what you said you were doing already, if I followed correctly

Now with the upcoming sidux "gaia", you could say "lang=it-ch", which I think would suit you better...

[kirol]

On 2d thought, you could try

knoppix lang=it keyboard=sg-latin1 xkeyboard=ch

or some variant I guess...

Once you've found the values that work for you, you can add these as defaults in the isolinux.cfg boot configuration file so you don't need to type them on every system start.

[Pfau]

Hi Kirol,
thanks for the explanation, but this does not completely solves my problem. Keyboard layout apart, lang=it sets both the KDE Italian language and the Italian locale. I wonder if there is a cheadcode that sets the county...

For example USA, Canada, UK, Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (and many other countries) use the same language (=English), but have different locales (for example currency, but also date & time notation). How is possible to specify the locale in the bootline?

Maybe this is not possible, but I think that it would be a nice feature...

Thanks again
Andrea