294 lines
13 KiB
HTML
294 lines
13 KiB
HTML
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
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<HTML>
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<HEAD>
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<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="SGML-Tools 1.0.9">
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<TITLE>German Howto: English Part (Englischer Teil)</TITLE>
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<LINK HREF="German-HOWTO-3.html" REL=next>
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<LINK HREF="German-HOWTO-1.html" REL=previous>
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<LINK HREF="German-HOWTO.html#toc2" REL=contents>
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</HEAD>
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<BODY>
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<A HREF="German-HOWTO-3.html">Next</A>
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<A HREF="German-HOWTO-1.html">Previous</A>
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<A HREF="German-HOWTO.html#toc2">Contents</A>
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<HR>
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<H2><A NAME="s2">2. English Part (Englischer Teil)</A></H2>
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<P>
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<P>
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<H2><A NAME="ss2.1">2.1 Introduction</A>
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</H2>
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<P>The Linux German Howto explains how to enable German specific features for
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Linux applications as well as for the Linux system. But what is German
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specific? If you have been to the worlds largest computer exhibition CeBIT
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in Hannover, you may consider traditional leather costumes, white sausages,
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(real!) beer and perfectely ironed underwear to be typical for
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germany. Please beg my pardon that I can't comment on the underwear part or
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else this Howto would at least get a R-rating, which would trigger
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questions about distribution restrictions and their impacts for free
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software and OpenSource and OpenDocumentation and so on. In the end we will
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surely have an OpenRating as well. Pure horror.
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<P>Regarding the other three points about germany mentioned above, these are
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correct as you may already have figured out yourself. Believe me, I'm just
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wearing such a traditional costume while typing the text in front of his
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computer. Everybody does all the time. Even my computer wears a leather
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costume, or else it would not be germany! Built into the leather case is a
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sound microprocessor to turn the simple PC-beep into an original south
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german yodel. Can you already see the alp mountains?
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<P>So what else is german specific? Maybe your friendly stewardess told you
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the waiter at a restaurant "is not offensive but doing regular
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service to you" before your plane arrived at the german airport.
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Cultures clashing into each other. Of course the waiter is doing his best,
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but at least the americans are not willing to understand. Example: In my
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home town the waiters are employed to serve the beer. This is a fundamental
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different concept than just aiming at bloody customer satisfaction. It
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counts that the beer can flow down your throat in a fresh state. The beer
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must be satisfied. Think of it as a religious believe. Next time the
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american president secretly visits me, I will explain and show him all the
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details. Promised.
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<P>Also quite typical for German are long words and long sentences. Example:
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The German translation of Howto is Sowirdsgemacht. More than double as
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long. My words are longer than yours. Ha! We can even go for extremes like
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in
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Dampfschifffahrtspensionskassenchefsekretärinnenhalbjahresbetriebsausflugsbudget.
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The typsetter will surely hate me for using such a long word. D78g, now
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all-together: Nyia-hahaha. As you can imagine, most applications will die
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because of string buffer overflows when german users start to type in their
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unusal long words. That is what the German Howto is about.
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<P>Not to forget our German speaking friends at the south: Austria and
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Switzerland. Read this Howto and learn how to manage your secret swiss
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bank account from within Linux. Making money fast is twice as much fun then.
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<P>Well, before I completely destroy the image of over-serious germans, lets
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come to the point. Linux is developed by a world wide community of hackers
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on the internet. Their least common denominator for communication is
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English and that works quite acceptable. The situation for users is
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different. In order to do their work, they have to use the native language
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and the specifics of their country. Examples: characters, time zones and
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numbering conventions. Luckily Linux is so widespread, that national
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markets have already become a target for Linux distributions. In other
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words, most adaptions are already built in. In this context the KDE project
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should be mentioned, as it surely has set milestones for the amount, ease
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and completeness of internationalization in applications. The German Howto
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honors this evolution by concentrating on basic knowledge instead of
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endless parameter listings.
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<P>The English part of the Howto is much shorter than the German one. It is
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only inteded as an overview of the situation.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H2><A NAME="ss2.2">2.2 Copyright, licence and disclaimer</A>
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</H2>
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<P>
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<P>© Winfried Trümper <me@wt.xpilot.org> 1994-2001. All rights reserved.
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<P>Distribution and use of this document are allowed under the following
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restrictions: The name of the author must not be used to endorse or promote
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products based on the German Howto and modified versions must be clearly
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identified as such.
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<P>Text, illustrations and programs in this Howto were crafted
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carefully. Nevertheless the chance of an error is always there.
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Because of the complexity and the frequent changes of computer systems,
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the author disclaims all warranties with regard to this document,
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including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a
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certain purpose; in no event shall the author be liable for any
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special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever
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resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of
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contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in
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connection with the use of this document.
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<P>Short: use this Howto at your own risk.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H2><A NAME="ss2.3">2.3 Availability</A>
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</H2>
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<P>Linux Howtos fill the gap between books and short readme files. They
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explain one subject in a detailed fashion. To fullfill this goal, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) has created a
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infrastructure consisting of authors, tools and distribution channels. The
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Linux German Howto is part of the LDP and thus available like all other
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Howtos. Either on the
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<A HREF="http://www.linuxdoc.org/">LDP homepage</A> or under the directory /usr/share/doc/howto/ on a typical Linux
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installation. Printed collections of Howtos published by various companies
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are available at your local bookstore.
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<P>The latest version of this document can be downloaded from
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<A HREF="http://wt.xpilot.org/">my homepage</A>.
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<P>Corrections and suggestions should be sent via email to my address
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me@wt.xpilot.org. Paid contracts for product placements in the introduction
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are also welcome.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H2><A NAME="ss2.4">2.4 Linux in German speaking countries</A>
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</H2>
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<P>
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<P>This is a small list of Linux portals, which are maintained and updated frequently:
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<P>
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<A HREF="http://www.linux.at/">Linux in Österreich</A><P>
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<A HREF="http://www.linux.ch/">Linux in der Schweiz</A><P>
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<A HREF="http://www.linux.de/">Linux.de</A><P>
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<A HREF="http://www.pro-linux.de/">Pro Linux</A><P>A large number of local Linux User Groups exists in Austria, Germany and
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Switzerland. You can find them in the directories of most German Linux Portals.
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Country wide associations are the
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<A HREF="http://www.linux-verband.de/">Linux-Verband</A>, which aims more at commercial members, and the
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<A HREF="http://www.guug.de/">German Unix User Group</A> (GUUG), which aims
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at system administrators. Three large conventions are held each year, the
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<A HREF="http://www.linuxtag.org/">LinuxTag</A> (LinuxDay), the
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<A HREF="http://www.linux-kongress.de">Linux-Kongress</A> and the
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<A HREF="http://www.linuxworldexpo.de">LinuxWorld Expo</A>. Local
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events are usally organised by the Linux User Groups and can be found in
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the calendars. The newsgroup hierarchy de.comp.os.unix.linux.* is a quite
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busy part of the german usenet. The same is true for the IRC channels
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#debian.de and #linuxger.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H2><A NAME="ss2.5">2.5 Configuration</A>
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</H2>
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<P>
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<H3>Characters</H3>
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<P>The traditional character sets for central europe are ISO-8859-1 and
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ISO-8859-15 (including the euro symbol). Please see the german part of this
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Howto for an excerpt of ISO-8859-15. Unicode covers both sets, but only
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few users have applications with full support for unicode. That may change
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in the future.
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<P>Conversions of the character sets have also be done when exchanging texts
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between Unix/Linux, Macintoshs and DOS/Windows systems. It is not enough to
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just convert the line endings. This is also true for printing; most
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printers expect the DOS-style text format. (When printing from word
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processors and such, high quality binary bitmaps are sent to the printer,
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which are not affected by character set and line ending problems.)
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<P>Quite annoying is the fact that y and z are exchanged compared to an
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english keyboard. Not to speak of the special characters like the
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slash. Now imagine you want to type yes and it always gives zes. Or you
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want to type /dev/sda and it gives ?dev?sda. Short: a keyboard mapping is
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required in europe. Every european country has its own keyboard layout. The
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right mapping can be choosen at installation time for all modern Linux
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distributions. Suitable for germany and austria is de-latin1-nodeadkeys,
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whereas the swiss people need sf-latin1 (swiss-french) or sg-latin1
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(swiss-german).
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<P>Please keep in mind that the loadkeys command only helps for a properly
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started system. To have the correct mapping even for the Lilo boot prompt,
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you have to create a key mapping with keytab-lilo.pl and configure Lilo
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to use that mapping.
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<P>The character set ISO-8859-1 shares the first 128 characters with
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US-ASCII and defines another 128 characters on top of it. To type in all
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these characters on the keyboard, it would be necassary to map up to four
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symbols per key. For cases where you access the complete set only
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occasionally,such a mapping would be a too high learning effort.
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One solution is the use of the compose key. After pressing the compose key,
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which is usally mapped to the right control key, the next character is not
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displayed but instead printed over the following character. Example:
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the sequence Right-Ctrl A is composed as the character à (capital a with
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a tilde on top).
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<P>An alternative is the feature of always composing keys. Under such
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mappings, characters like are never displayed but always printed over the
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following character. Usally this feature is refered to as dead keys, which
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is a little bit misleading. I'm not aware of anybody using the dead keys
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feature.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H3>Currency</H3>
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<P>On january 1st 2002, the last step of the currency union in europe was
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performed. Since then the currency is euro and its fraction is
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cent. Although there is a special currency symbol in ISO-8859-15 and in
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unicode, you can safely use the ISO currency code EUR for euro as you used
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ATS for austrian schillings or DEM for deutsche marks before. Please note
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that switzerland (CHF, swiss francs) is not part of the european union.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H3>XFree86</H3>
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<P>There is nothing special about XFree86 for German users. Howevery, several
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hardware manufactures asked me for the correct setting, which is why I'm
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citing them here.
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<P>
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<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
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<PRE>
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# for XFree86 4.1.* only:
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Section "InputDevice"
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Driver "Keyboard"
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Identifier "Keyboard[0]"
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Option "Protocol" "Standard"
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Option "XkbLayout" "de"
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Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
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Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
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Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
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EndSection
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# for XFree86 3.* only:
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Section "Keyboard"
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Protocol "Standard"
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XkbRules "xfree86"
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XkbKeycodes "xfree86"
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XkbModel "pc104"
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XkbLayout "de"
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XkbVariant "nodeadkeys"
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EndSection
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</PRE>
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</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
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<P>
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<P>
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<H2><A NAME="ss2.6">2.6 Time zone</A>
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</H2>
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<P>The time zones for central europe are CET (Central European Time) and CEST
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(Central European Summer Time) respectively. However, system administrators
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are expected to use one of the aliases Europe/Berlin, Europe/Vienna or
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Europe/Zurich. This gives correct results even before the Unix Epoch.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H3>Internationalization and lokalization</H3>
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<P>Internationalization and lokalization are unusal long words (but not as
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long as D78g, see above) and thus abreviated by i18n and i10n. The numbers
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indicate how many characters have been left out.
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<P>I18n denotes the changes to the program code in order to have a multi
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lingual output. A common implementation is to seperate the messages from the
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code. This way several translated texts share the same code base. German
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messages are activated with the LANG environment variable. Examples:
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<P>
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<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
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<PRE>
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#LANG=de_AT # for austria
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#LANG=de_CH # for switzerland (German)
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LANG=de_DE # for germany
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export LANG
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</PRE>
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</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
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<P>The result is not always satisfying, because not all applications and
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libraries are internationalized. It may happen that German and English
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messages are mixed like in the following example, which also illustrates
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the evolution of the problem:
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<P>
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<BLOCKQUOTE><CODE>
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<PRE>
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# in 1997:
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tar: Kann Archiv 'foo.tgz' nicht öffnen: Permission denied
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# in 2001:
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tar: foo.tgz: Cannot open: Keine Berechtigung
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</PRE>
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</CODE></BLOCKQUOTE>
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<P>German messages alone don't make much sense. Applications must also display
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the data using the correct format. Example: 08.07.2001 instead of 07.08.2001
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or EUR 10.000,32 instead of EUR 10,000.32. You get the idea. The required
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changes to the programm are denoted as i10n. Today the LANG variable also
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activates the associated locale.
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<P>
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<P>
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<H3>Paper size</H3>
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<P>The standard paper size in europe is DIN A4, which is a little bit smaller
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and taller than US-letter. The aspect ratio of height vs. width is the
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square root of two. All sizes are derived from A0 by a centered cut at the
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longer side.
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<P>
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<P>
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<HR>
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<A HREF="German-HOWTO-3.html">Next</A>
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<A HREF="German-HOWTO-1.html">Previous</A>
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<A HREF="German-HOWTO.html#toc2">Contents</A>
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