Ubuntu
ubiquity package

How is papersize determined now?

Asked by era

On my current system, I have /etc/papersize "letter" where I would sort of vaguely have liked for it to be a4. When I installed this system, I did select English but a Finnish keyboard layout and Europe/Helsinki as my location.

I tried to understand the fix for bug #104160, but couldn't. I even downloaded the source code for ubiquity but it seems that the fix basically just entails letting some other package really decide what the value should be.

What can I do during installation to select English as the system language but A4 as the default paper size?

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Colin Watson
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nglnx (nglnx) said : 		#1

This seems to be an ongoing problem for Finish users as can be seen in this bug report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/language-selector/+bug/183755

The following page tries to present some solutions:

http://myy.helia.fi/~karte/english_in_finland_on_ubuntu.html

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era (era) said : 		#2

I've seen Karvinen's page but it really mainly deals with how to clean up the mess after you've already installed, as far as I could discern. My question is more of what I can expect from the default installer, should I simply assume it will default to Letter if I choose English, regardless of other settings?

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nglnx (nglnx) said : 		#3

Unfortunately yes, AFAIK.

I recommend that you and all those affected by this comment the apropriate bugs to push for a change in the installer.

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Colin Watson (cjwatson) said : 		#4

The previous answer is not correct. The installer (correctly, IMO) defaults to whatever the locale uses for paper size. For example, if you select English and the United Kingdom, it will default to A4.

The problem is that there is simply no en_FI locale. There's really no good solution to this that I know of right now, although there are already bugs open about very similar problems.

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era (era) said : 		#5

Karvinen's pages suggest en_DK -- would it be appropriate to file a bug to request fallback to en_DK if the user selects English in combination with a location which does not have an "en" locale defined for it? I suppose the en_DK locale exists for this reason; to my knowledge, Denmark doesn't have any particularly significant English-speaking population. (Maybe Belgium would be the politically correct EU compromise otherwise :-)

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Philipp Bönhof (phboe-launchpad) said : 		#6

To really have this at the time of installation is very difficult. Actually I don't know either how to do it then, when you choose English as language.

But when you are done with the installation and want to have for all users on the system the default paper size A4 you could just change /etc/papersize to contain just a4 instead of letter.

Hope this helps with your problem.

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era (era) said : 		#7

Again, my question is more concerned with whether it makes sense to post a bug report against ubiquity than to declare the current workarounds as sufficiently obvious and obviously sufficient for most users.

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Best Colin Watson (cjwatson) said : 		#8

The relevant bug report is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/57411, and is absolutely a valid bug (even though difficult to solve); no need for another one, though feel free to comment on that.

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era (era) said : 		#9

Thanks Colin Watson, that solved my question.