Developers FAQ

This page gathers all the frequently asked questions for developers. Surely if your question is not in this page, please feel free to ask us! You can also use comments of this page.

1- General

1.1- Where can I find some help?

Visit our project home. Our project provides two public mailing lists:

• Doudoulinux-dev for developers
• Doudoulinux-forum for users

You can also contact us by email at contribute@doudoulinux.org.

2- Localization

2.1- Can you upload a Live image for my language to help me improve it?

If you want to start translating DoudouLinux for a new language but don’t want to bother with generating it by yourself, you can ask us to generate it for you then upload it onto our server. You just need to send us your full language code and your keyboard layout. We can then iterate from the “raw” first Live image to the final one by exchanging texts files containing your translations.

2.2- How to list available keyboard layouts

See http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWT.... Everything is in the console-setup package. It provides a tool that lists available keyboard layouts:

$ /usr/share/console-setup/kbdnames-maker /usr/share/console-setup/KeyboardNames.pl

Example:

$ /usr/share/console-setup/kbdnames-maker /usr/share/console-setup/KeyboardNames.pl | grep ’\*es\*’
layout*es*Spain
variant*es**Spain
variant*es*dvorak*Spain - Dvorak
variant*es*sundeadkeys*Spain - Sun dead keys
variant*es*nodeadkeys*Spain - Eliminate dead keys
variant*es*cat*Spain - Catalan variant with middle-dot L
variant*es*mac*Spain - Macintosh
variant*es*ast*Spain - Asturian variant with bottom-dot H and bottom-dot L

You can also find a list of keyboard variants in file /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst. Example:

$ grep -E ’ ru:? ’ /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.lst
  ru              Russia
  ru              ge: Russian
  phonetic        ru: Phonetic
  typewriter      ru: Typewriter
  legacy          ru: Legacy
  tt              ru: Tatar
  os_legacy       ru: Ossetian, legacy
  os_winkeys      ru: Ossetian, Winkeys
  cv              ru: Chuvash
  cv_latin        ru: Chuvash Latin
  udm             ru: Udmurt
  kom             ru: Komi

2.3- How to list available character encodings

Everything is in the locales package. It provides the /usr/share/i18n/locales/ directory which is filled with character sets:

$ ls /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_*
/usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_BE       /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_FR
/usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_BE@euro  /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_FR@euro
/usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_CA       /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_LU
/usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_CH       /usr/share/i18n/locales/fr_LU@euro

Another alternative is to extract the file /usr/share/live-initramfs/languagelist from package live-initramfs. It provides a full list of language codes, language names, country codes and locales.

3- Application development

3.1- Patching applications vs. hooks

Some applications may require some of their files be modified to work as expected. You can experiment file modification in the config-base/chroot_local-includes/ tree or even a given language tree config-l10n/xx/chroot_local-includes/. Nevertheless it is certainly always better to provide a patched Debian package in the doudoulinux/packages/ root tree since it will then be easier to build any other system with your patches!

4- Miscellaneous

4.1- Removing obsolete DoudouLinux apt-cacher packages

If DoudouLinux packages are rebuilt without changing their version number, it may happen that apt-cacher does not reload them. In this case you may encounter a “size mismatch” error for some packages. The solution consists in manually purging the apt-cacher cache with these commands:

for PACKAGE in $(find path/to/doudoulinux/packages/trunk/debian/ -name '*.deb' -exec basename {} \;) ; do
	sudo find /var/cache/apt-cacher/ -name "$PACKAGE*" -exec rm {} \;
done