Language selection

[Jaap Winius]

Hi folks,

What's the best solution for Xfce desktop language selection?

My site uses Debian squeeze workstations that need support for both
English and Dutch. Currently we use gdm, which has few dependencies and a
greeter with a nice little language selector.

Soon, however, we'll be upgrading to Debian wheezy, in which gdm has been
dropped in favor of gdm3 (which has far too many Gnome dependencies).
Unfortunately, the latter has no language selector. Nor does kdm (which
also has too many dependencies), xdm, or wdm. Lightdm does have a
language selector when lightdm-gtk-greeter is also installed, but this
selector doesn't work due to a bug that's present in both the Debian
wheezy (and sid) and experimental versions of these packages.

With no language selector in the greeter, Gnome desktop users are now
apparently expected to set this by using the gnome-control-center or the
the DBus interface. Xfce, however, does not seem to have this option.

A method that I do not want to use is to set wheezy's default locale to
English or Dutch. I want to leave that choice up to the users who share
these workstations, and as sysadmin I prefer to use 'none' for the
default locale anyway.

My current strategy for wheezy is simply to keep the old version of gdm
working as long as I can, but I wish I had a better solution.

Thanks,

Jaap