You're ready to be a card-carrying Linux geek, but with several different Linux distributions available, you don't know where to start. Which one offers the best balance of tools, performance, and price? Bryan Hoff takes you through the most popular Linux distros and introduces you to a brave new world without Windows.
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Member since:2005-07-12
- distros speaking my language (French): very few
- distros having man pages in French: practically none
Well, it seems like you have your work cut out for you. Man pages can be translated, as well as the language the distro is speaking.
Pick the distro/application of your choice and start translating, it's your way to add to the linux community 
. I do the same for some english (web)applications, Translate it into (fairly decent) Dutch.
Member since:2005-07-02
Did you try Mandriva? It's a french distro and the french support is pretty good...don't know about Man pages, though. I'm completely bilingual so I tend not to notice when something is in English only...
I'm pretty sure Mandriva has the Euro symbol, though maybe not in console - that depends of your console font.
As far as console-mode keyboard it is not handled by X, but by its own low-level driver (though I don't believe it's actually part of the kernel). You can use linuxconf to try and configure it.
Member since:As far as console-mode keyboard it is not handled by X, but by its own low-level driver (though I don't believe it's actually part of the kernel). You can use linuxconf to try and configure it.
I googled a lot about that, and suprisingly I have found very little infos. If I'm no 100% sure about this issue, I succeed to find some obscure Debian doc saying this driver has to be optimized. At the present state, a command like
$loadkeys mapping_kbd
is not fully functional. It is remapping keys, some kind of one to one remap, but the driver is still unable to handle chars created with dead keys and with composed keys.
I do not think, tweaking linuxconf will help. I made the following experiment, I restart an Ubuntu installation. At the beginning, you are asked for the country, language and keyboard - still not under X -. At the keyboard choice level, you have the possibility to test the kbd and, indeed, it is not working with the above mentioned keys. Unbelievable! in mid 2005, Linux is still not able to do what DOS was correctly doing 20 years ago.
This not too dramatic, under Gnome and KDE, the kbd is working fine. But anyway.
Side note: no such problem on BSD.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
- distros speaking my language (French): very few
- distros having man pages in French: practically none
- distros allowing the use of the Euro currency symbol out of the box: I found only one: Ubuntu. My test: open a console and type $echo "this book costs 2 €".
- distros supporting correctly my swiss french keyboard: none. Here, I should make a difference between X and pure console mode Linux. On X (KDE, gnome), I have no problem, but with distros like Damn Small Linux or froddo (Slax), it it impossible. I "googled" a lot, I'm still wondering if Linux (kernel?) has a driver handling non us keyboards.