Considerations about official localized editions of Live CDs

[Arne Goetje]

Tom Davies wrote:
> Hi :)
> 
> I am not arguing against the idea. I think it is a very valid and
> good point.
> 
> While there are some existing projects it would be great to see these
> having more official support from the main Ubuntu website and places.
> Perhaps those projects could have links back to Ubuntu's main site?

Would need to ask the people in charge of the website if that is
possible. But then you need to answer the question, where to draw the
line. If you list "community editions" of Ubuntu on the main website,
you would probably need to list every single community edition out there.

> Where there are no existing projects perhaps there is just a need for
> some people to volunteer their time to develop something. In linux
> land it is very often your choice about which projects you develop
> further.  Often if you put work into a project yourself you see
> developments happening faster as a result. Putting in voluntary work
> yourself and doing team-building, encouraging others to join in gets
> a better result than just saying "We should have this or that".
> 
> However, perhaps there are even easier answers to this. 1. Perhaps
> choosing a particular mirror would lead to appropriate languages
> being included as defaults? 2. Perhaps the default language pack

Nope, the image needs to be rebuild from scratch and that is not done on
the mirrors.

> could cut out 4 or 5 of the versions of english and instead have 4 or
> 5 of the "most commonly spoken/written languages" such as Chinese
> (because it is widely used) and Spanish because it is often quickly
> completed. Having en-us, en-gb, en-aus all included in the default
> language pack seems odd in many ways although i can see good
> technical reason why it is set-up like that.

Spanish is included in the default image. The technical reason to put
all en- variants into one language-pack is, that all the en-variants are
just diffs to en-us. Since we don't want to have a dedicated set of
packages for each language variant, we include them all in one set
(unless they get too big, like the Chinese ones (zh-hans vs zh-hant),
which are not diffs to each other, but completely separated
translations). A set currently consists of 6 language-pack packages.
If you want to know more details about language-packs, just ping me, I'm
maintaining them. :)

> The particular Chinese distro i was thinking of was 
> http://www.cdlinux.info/wiki/doku.php/ although a quick search showed
> a dissappointingly few other linux distros which use Chinese by
> default.  Usually DistrowWatch is good at including even tiny and
> almost unknown distros but their Japanese coverage seems far better
> than their Chinese coverage. Anyway this wasnt the main point about
> what i was saying. Mainly i was saying YES, please can we develop
> more official support or better clearer links from the Ubuntu site to
> 'regionalised' variants of Ubuntu?

@Aron:
While it is not particularly difficult to replace the language-packs on
the Live CD with other ones (I did it myself for zh_TW for Hardy), those
images cannot be called "official" for various reasons. AFAIK those
images need to be called "Community Edition", and if you print CD covers
for them, this also needs to be clearly stated. You can probably find
more information on this on the Canonical website in the Legal section.

I'm not speaking for the company here, but you need to keep in mind that
Canonical, as the main sponsor of Ubuntu, provides commercial support
for the "official" Ubuntu release. However, we cannot provide this
support for the localised Ubuntu editions for various reasons, the most
significant I can think of is the lack of human resources.

The idea of localised Ubuntu images is not new, some have even suggested
that we build and host them all on the main server. This however is not
feasible, since each image needs to be thoroughly tested before it can
be released and those images use a significant amount of space, both on
the disk, and on the bandwidth when mirroring to other servers. Think
about the time it takes to build and test each image in each flavour and
the amount of data, the mirrors would need to pull. Simply not possible.

That said, you are free to build customised images and to distribute
them on your own, but you would create a derivative of Ubuntu and thus
would be solely responsible for it and for the support.

Cheers
Arne

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