Change Language of Desktop Environment in GhostBSD

[wb7odyfred]

How To Change Language of Desktop Environment in GhostBSD

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Author: Pino Cuccaro
Date: 01-11-2021

This How-To explains how to change the language setting of GhostBSD's desktop environment.
It is based on the description of user "SashaDim" posted in the GhostBSD Telegram group.

As the originally used "slick-greeter" is not able to manage different languages we need to replace it.

1.) Crate zfs snapshot to be able to revert if something goes wrong:
#beadm create before_language_change

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beadm create before_language_change

2.) install "lightdm-gtk-greeter" and "lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings"
#pkg install lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings

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pkg install lightdm-gtk-greeter lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings

3.) Edit file "/usr/local/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf"
and modified the field "greeter-session" from "slick-greeter" to "lightdm-gtk-greeter"

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/usr/local/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

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lightdm-gtk-greeter

4.) launch "lightdm-gtk-greeter-setting" (as root user) and make sure you have checked the "Languages menu" and "Keyboard layout" items.
You might have to enable to show not used elements in order for "Keyboard layout" to show up in the available options.

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 sudo lightdm-gtk-greeter-setting

5.) Reboot (or log out from your actual desktop session)

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 reboot

6.) At Login selected the language of your choice and there you are.


In case you want to revert to the original state because of some unexpected issues, you can do so by simply selecting option
"8. Boot Environments" at the loader stage and selecting the zfs snapshot you created before making the changes.
In our case this snapshot is called "before_language_change".



Notes:

I am not at my home now, so I cannot check. But I remember having set something like
: lang = de_CH.UTF-8

In fact my actual greeter is in German. And there I select English as DE language.
see no changes in /etc/login.conf

I see a few other changes in different files in my home dir:

.profile
CHARSET=UTF-8; export CHARSET
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8; export LANG

.xprofile
#!/bin/sh
setxkbmap -model dellsk8125 -layout ch -variant de_sundeadkeys