Language chooser at login

[Oliver Grawert]

hi,
Am Dienstag, den 05.07.2011, 13:43 +1000 schrieb Robert Ancell:
> On 04/07/11 17:41, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> > ... pretty much every environment edubuntu is used in (public desktops
> > in school classrooms at universities or libraries), non personalized
> > computers in multilingual companies, public computers at airports,
> > hotels, internet cafes etc
> Are these all cases of where the computer is setup with a single guest
> account?  So the requirement here is that guest accounts require a
> language setting?
right, on public machines you usually dont use a persistent account.

> 
> Note that this doesn't necessarily have to be implemented in the
> greeter, i.e. you can run zenity in the guest accounts .profile and that
> prompts the user on login for language.  Or you can make multiple
> sessions for each installed language, i.e. there is a single menu for
> the login settings which has "English", "Japanese", "German" which each
> load Unity with differing settings.  I expect in these cases you don't
> want to provide an option to choose session type (Unity/GNOME) anyway.
that sounds quite hackish, and up to that selection the whole UI would
be english also i know a good bunch of internet cafes and school setups
where you can (and people do) select between different desktops, its not
an uncommon combination ...

> 
> So this also raises the question, if the only requirement is for guest
> sessions does the standard Ubuntu need to support these scenarios out of
> the box?  Note of course Edubuntu can deliver their default install
> differently.
> 
edubuntu was just part of the example above, in many cases people just
use ubuntu as multilingual terminals or desktops. 
while such a feature could indeed live in the guest session package i
think that still provides a horrid UI experience for non english
speaking people. 

would it be possible to provide a plugin system for the UI ? so someone
from the community could code some langauge selector that would hook
visually proper into the theme, hand over variables to the greeter etc ?
that way you would not have to do it in the DM code itself nor would
have to maintain it but people could still get the feature.

ciao
	oli