On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 16:57 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le mercredi 30 avril 2008 à 20:03 -0400, Matthew Saltzman a écrit :
> IIRC (maybe someone who was there can correct me), back in the early
> days of Red Hat Linux (like 3.0.3 or something), the first experiment in
> i18n was to create the Redneck locale (was it Donnie Barnes who was the
> Carolina native who was the target of that little joke?). The staff
> thought it was amusing enough that they left it in as a language option
> in the installer, so you saw all the dialog boxes translated from
> English to Redneck.
>
> I (transplanted Yankee) thought it was kind of amusing at the time, but
> I suppose it doesn't really have a place in a polished, professional,
> worldwide distro.
The joke and even the cooked-up locale were fine. Calling attention to
them in later release image trains was not. Like it or not but a core
argument for Linux adoption outside the USA is to stop sending vast sums
of money abroad to big American proprietary software houses. Insisting
heavily on an American Fedora personality in our initial screens is thus
self defeating (that is probably one reason Debian kicks our asses in
all the government-sponsored non-US Linux desktop deployments BTW).
Maybe I'm just insensitive, but I haven't noticed too much US-centric
stuff on the installer pages (other than the fact that, until you select
a language, the messages are in US English). Really obvious chauvinism
annoys me, too. I'll have to try to see the F9 installer through your
eyes.
But if the option is no longer there, then one might conclude that RH
has caught on to your point.
Just read the grass-root reports on big Linux deployments that get
regularly posted on Fedora planet (and other venues). Keeping money
locally is always the first argument. When localisation, support for non
latin scripts, and having a non-US-centric solution isn't.
> My spell-checker is complaining about some of your 's''s 8^).
That's probably because your spell-checker does not know my messages use
the British English dialect.
That's settable with a checkbox. It complained about the French, too.
But it did display the accent on the e in "écrit".
Your smiley detector appears to be off...
--
Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs