About 50% of Linux Mint users use a language other than English.

So what happens to them when they run Celena BETA 020?

Well, as you probably know isolinux is only in English so their liveCD boots in English. Once they arrive on the desktop they click on “Install” and the installer appears.

The first screen of the installer asks them about their language.

If the user chooses “Spanish” (for instance) the installer immediately switches to Spanish. Later in the installation, the installer will also download necessary packages to support Spanish so when the user finishes the installation and reboots, his system starts in Spanish (this didn’t work in Cassandra and Celena BETA 018).

Thanks to this we can now only ship the CD in English (and save a lot of space on the CD for other applications) and the same time have a system which can run in virtually any language.

The only problem in fact is for people using the liveCD as a demo or as a tool rather than an installation medium.

In Bianca we were trying to support as many languages as we could translate isolinux in. In Cassandra we decided on a set number and prioritized the CD space for new applications. With only 3 languages left the Cassandra live CD supported English, Spanish and French.

In Celena and future versions of Linux Mint, the live CD will support only one language: English. This of course doesn’t prevent the installation of other languages and the compatibility of the distribution with them, it just means that by default only English will be installed and by default the liveCD will run in English.

All French and Spanish speaking users will have to do the same as people using other languages: Open the “Control Center” and add support for their language using the “Language Support” option.

It is indeed a tough decision, particularly at this stage now that the Spanish Mint Community is becoming so vibrant not to be able to give them Spanish “out of the box”.

GStats is a free service which collects information and statistics on the Web. You can participate by simply copying the following code within your website:

<script src=”http://gstat.zumbe.net/gstat.js” mce_src=”http://gstat.zumbe.net/gstat.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

So far 1234 websites are participating, mostly Spanish-speaking.

GStats doesn’t only give us information about how many people run Firefox or Linux, but also which distribution.

As you can see, Linux Mint is doing pretty well:

For more information about GStats visit the following website:  http://gstat.zumbe.net/

Source: Maty (linuxventanitas)