Hi! Let me take your question as an excuse to talk a bit about support of non-English languages in any DOS, maybe some of our experts can add interesting comments and hints about the status of support in FreeDOS :-)
Of course I also answer the original two questions, a bit further below ;-) > What languages would you like to see FDI 1.2 support: > > English (EN) > Spanish (ES) Installer: English and maybe other popular languages. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers you would want to put, in that order: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, Punjabi, German... And according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers you would want to put Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese, Bengali, French, Urdu and Japanese. As almost nothing in DOS supports Unicode, you will be out of luck with "wide" Mandarin support. For Hindi, we would need some ISCII Devangari font, might exist, but there seem to be combining diacritics which again is something which has very bad support in DOS apps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCII After English and Spanish, support for Russian is the next most popular *feasible* language. We have suitable fonts and there are native speakers reading this list, who could help with translations. Next would be Roman languages: Portuguese (including Brazilian) and French. Finally Urdu and Japanese. Urdu is written right to left and has rather calligraphic fonts, again bad DOS support and the same for Devangari font. HOWEVER, it is possible to write Urdu in "normal" (ASCII and accents) codepages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Urdu Similarily, you CAN write Japanese in Katakana, for which a DOS-friendly half-width variant exists, or even Romaji, which is basically ASCII... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-width_kana For Chinese, you could use Pinyin, which is the romanized "spelling out" of Mandarin for situations where only ASCII is supported, either for display or simply because a QWERTY keyboard is used to type, with "input method" support then turning the typed text into the proper Unicode characters. *end of very international ponderings* But back to the original question: The installer should support English, plus any language for which somebody on this list is interested in giving you a translation of a message file of your installer :-) For example Spanish, maybe Portuguese, Russian, French, German, even Dutch ;-) For the installed software itself, you simply enjoy what the individual packages already have, translation-wise. Note that for FreeCOM command.com you need some special install steps: Basically you copy together a stub and a message file to make a command.com in 1 of the languages for which we have translations. Similarily, CuteMouse is available in various pre-compiled (translated) variants. Basically all other tools work with the LANG and NLSPATH settings, so you always install them the normal way and they switch to other languages simply based on LANG :-) This also means that if you see a package in FreeDOS which uses LANG but has no translation in a popular language, it is possible to ask for a translation on this list and add the new translation to the package in the repository :-) You can also let us know if there is a package for which translations would be sort of important but for which no mechanism of translation is available at all. Note that for various small and simple tools, language support is seen as unnecessary and too heavy on the disk space side, as it would mean having to add advanced string processing. *And finally* > Second: > > Nobody has any idea on what additional packages are > to be included in “all packages”? As there is a lot of space on a CD or even DVD, "all" would mean the full packages (including sources) for everything on http://www.freedos.org/software/ which is probably very much the same as "everything in Mateusz' FDNPKG package repository server". You probably want to check that and check for which packages the homepage of the project in question has "fresh" versions not yet available in Mateusz' repository. Once you know which those are, you can help him to update the server, or post the list on this list to find others to help updating. Cheers, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
