Ubiquity installer not usable on machines with <= 256 MB of RAM

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 11:43:02AM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 07:27:22PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 10:52:18AM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > > find /usr/lib/locale -type f | xargs -n1 gzip -c |wc -c
> > > 
> > > should better approximate the space they might occupy on the live CD.  The
> > > difference could be significant at that scale.
> > 
> > Oh, really? I thought that files in the same directory would probably be
> > adjacent in the squashfs and thus compressed all at once.
> 
> I'm pretty certain squashfs compresses files separately, otherwise opening a
> file would require decompressing the entire stream to seek up to the
> appropriate point.  It would also make the ISOs very un-rsyncable.

Good point.

> > > At what point do you propose to pre-generate them?  During the package build
> > > or the livefs build?  Which packages in total would need to be changed in
> > > order to support this?
> > 
> > During the livefs build, by strategic calls to locale-gen. Ubiquity and
> > localechooser would need to be changed.
> 
> Won't this make the live CD builds take significantly longer?

It would add a few minutes, I think.

> How many locales are in your proposed list (could you post a copy
> here)?

Using 'grep -v ^\# languagelist | cut -d\; -f4 | sort' in localechooser,
which I think is more or less what we want modulo one or two exceptions:

  C ar_EG.UTF-8 be_BY.UTF-8 bg_BG.UTF-8 bn_BD bs_BA.UTF-8 ca_ES.UTF-8
  cs_CZ.UTF-8 cy_GB.UTF-8 da_DK.UTF-8 de_DE.UTF-8 el_GR.UTF-8
  en_US.UTF-8 en_XX.UTF-8 es_ES.UTF-8 et_EE.UTF-8 eu_ES.UTF-8 fa_IR
  fi_FI.UTF-8 fr_FR.UTF-8 gl_ES.UTF-8 he_IL.UTF-8 hi_IN hr_HR.UTF-8
  hu_HU.UTF-8 id_ID.UTF-8 is_IS.UTF-8 it_IT.UTF-8 ja_JP.UTF-8
  kk_KZ.UTF-8 ko_KR.UTF-8 ku_TR.UTF-8 lt_LT.UTF-8 lv_LV.UTF-8
  mg_MG.UTF-8 mk_MK.UTF-8 nb_NO.UTF-8 nl_NL.UTF-8 nn_NO.UTF-8 pa_IN
  pl_PL.UTF-8 pt_BR.UTF-8 pt_PT.UTF-8 ro_RO.UTF-8 ru_RU.UTF-8
  se_NO.UTF-8 sk_SK.UTF-8 sl_SI.UTF-8 sq_AL.UTF-8 sv_SE.UTF-8
  th_TH.UTF-8 tl_PH.UTF-8 tr_TR.UTF-8 uk_UA.UTF-8 vi_VN wo_SN
  xh_ZA.UTF-8 zh_CN.UTF-8 zh_TW.UTF-8

> Would the other locales still be generated for the installed system?

Yes, from my earlier mail:

  We would need a small amount of judo to make sure that the real locale
  is generated in the installed system eventually, but we can install a
  temporary init script or something to do that.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]