Other Help Topics :: Develop Chinese input Environment as .unc

hi, Robert,

Thanks to your book that I now know more about how to create extensions for DSL. So the story is that I am trying to create an extension (preferably .unc for lower end computers) for chinese input environment such as xcin. (ref.
http://seba.studentenweb.org/thesis/linux.php) What I need is chinese fonts (surprisely it is already included in dsl-4.0), an input method editor like xcin, and proper locales (>= 2.2.4-1).
In order to install xcin from "apt-get install xcin", the locales needs to be (>= 2.2.4-1), so I tried "apt-get upgrade locales" and the following is what I got:

Code Sample

[/home/dsl]# apt-get upgrade locales
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be upgraded
bzip2 libbz2-1.0 mpg321 pcmcia-cs
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
E: Could not open lock file /var/cache/apt/archives/lock - open (28 No space left on device)
E: Unable to lock the download directory

The question now is "Is there anyway we can get around the problem and install xcin?" "Can locales be separated as extensions?" "Can locales be upgraded using extensions?" "Can any of the files or directories embeded in the CD image appended or modified using extensions (like mount --bind)?"

Thank you for your assistance!!

You can get the files from the Debian package manually. The Debian package can be downloaded from the Debian Sarge repository. (DSL's glibc is the same version as Sarge.)
Download page is here: http://packages.debian.org/sarge/locales/all/download
First make a directory, then extract files into it using 'dpkg-deb':

Code Sample

mkdir whatever/
dpkg-deb --extract locales_2.3.2.ds1-22sarge6_all.deb whatever/

Re:

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"Can locales be separated as extensions?" "Can locales be upgraded using extensions?"

You probably do not need all the locales; I think Xcin needs only the Chinese locales (zh_**). So, it is a matter of choosing the files you want and creating a tarball. If you are proficient with 'tar' it should be easy.

Re:

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"Can any of the files or directories embeded in the CD image appended or modified using extensions (like mount --bind)?"

I don't know about 'mount --bind' - Sorry! But it should be possible with a UNC extension. Let's say your root directory is 'whatever/' - e.g. 'whatever/etc/' 'whatever/usr/' etc. So:

Code Sample

mkisofs -R -hide-rr-moved -cache-inodes -pad whatever/ | create_compressed_fs - 65536 > any_name.unc

UNC only does the same thing as .dsl extensions, except it uses less RAM.

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... so I tried "apt-get upgrade locales" ...

I think that's a wrong use of upgrade (see manpage, etc.)

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the locales needs to be (>= 2.2.4-1), so I tried "apt-get upgrade locales"

'upgrade' will perform a system-wide upgrade. The correct command is 'apt-get install'.

You can choose whether to install it or not.
'apt-get install' will download and install.
'apt-get -d install' or 'apt-get --download-only install' will download but not install.
Regardless of which choice you make, packages will be downloaded to '/var/cache/apt/archives/'.

original here.