That's what I need to do. Locale issues is what's worrying me.

I have this program that I want to install in English, Romanian, Portugese. Spanish, Tagalog(Philipines), Chinese, Malayam(India) and Arabic, and possibly other languages. It is to run on the same pc, with a screen & keyboard built into the wall one place and the box in another room, for space reasons. I didn't design this pc, I inherited it from the losers who did.

The Program is a data library lookup thing, and all languages nest neatly into .../Program\ Files/<Title>/<Year of issue>/<Language>. So I'm starting with a vision of slackware, running xfce, booting straight to X windows and offering languages as users. Security is not an issue here. Every user sees a very empty desktop with the one icon on it. I could probasbly limit that to one user per charset if I could get the accents right.

How, in any system? I'd even install windows if that was the way to go. But afaik the internet cafes here use a separate pc for linux.

Thinking of one luser per language, That requires separate ~/.wine dirs and disk space, but simplifies the locale issues. I could probably symlink ~/.wine in each language to /home/wine, and set broad permissions on it.

Getting an English locale root to set passwords in Chinese & Arabic also promises to be interesting.

Any ideas welcome, or experience from anyone who has done something similar.

So the program is a Windows executable, that you consider running through Wine, correct?

If the program was run directly in Windows, how would the user select the locale then use it?

Does the user need to input information in a character set that depends on the language (then you'd need some input method for CJK), or only the display needs to to be localized? What are the basic functions of the software and how are these functions accessed by the user?

The program is a searchable publications index in the various languages https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManag...ation&iId=1485

There's a lot of point & click, not a few menu/action combinations, and a search box which really wants input. How chinese/Arabic input works from an Irish keyboard I have _no_idea_.

The value of the thing is that it's a huge information resource. There are also people who want to research in one language, (Their mother tongue) and then translate into another and there's a 'synch' function which caters for this.

Looking around, it seems gnome has the best set of language packs, although I do like slackware, and slackware doesn't seem to like gnome.

Whilst I respect all beliefs, I don't want to help propagate any of them. So this will be my last post in this thread.

Well, that's not the same issue:

• Arabic alphabet easily fits on a standard keyboard (for some characters, the glyph to be displayed vary upon position of the letter in the word, but that's the rendering engine's job to select the good one, not a keyboard issue)
• There are thousands of Chinese ideographs instead so to type one you need a combination of key presses and/or mouse actions. You use for that a so-called "input method" that is implemented through a specific software, like e.g. SCIM shipped in Slackware.

Well, you can find mate packages usable on Slackware. And Slackware ships all glibc's locale definitions.

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Thanks for your input, Didier.
As for propagating any beliefs, the question doesn't arise. It's about informing those who already hold such beliefs - something most religious organizations neglect sadly. That should be enough to get me going,. so I'll mark this solved