Language selection

[Lorenzo Sutton]

On 07/12/12 07:30, Jaap Winius wrote:
> 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.
This is still in the domain of hackland but you could do as follows with 
slim:

Make a copy of startxfce4 (usually in /usr/bin) and call it e.g. 
startxfce4-nl or maybe a more friendly name,
At the top of this new file (after the comments) add the entries for nl 
locale (which of course has to be installed):

//LANG=nl_NL.utf8
LANGUAGE=nl_NL:it
LC_CTYPE="nl_NL.UTF-8"
...
...
...


etcetera (see output of locale command...)

Then add this newly created file to the sessions entry in the slim.conf 
(usually /etc/slim.conf) file.

At this point when at the slim logion you press F1 it should cycle the 
entries in sessions including your newly created startxfce4-nl (or 
whatever you called it), and starting that the locale settings should be 
for NL_nl.

Disclaimer: I didn't test this thoroughly but it did work some time ago 
when I wanted to log in with Italian locale to test some stuff (I use 
english by default) but YMMV.

Good luck,
Lorenzo.

>
> 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
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