PiNet, a system for Raspberry Pi classrooms

Additional languages

If you wish to use PiNet with languages other than English, you have a few options.

PiNet control panel

Unfortunately right now, the PiNet control panel is only available in English.
Work is though in progress to start supporting internationalisation. If you are able to help with translating the project, please sign up on the translators mailing list here.

Raspbian

Sometimes it is ok to just have the Raspbian operating system (chroot) available to students in your home language.
By default, the Raspbian chroot will pull the locale settings from the main Ubuntu server, but if you wish to change the locales used on Raspbian, or add multiple options, follow the instructions below.
Note - Not all software may have available localisation for your language, many still only support English.

  1. Open a terminal on the server.
  2. Enter sudo ltsp-chroot --arch armhf to enter the Raspbian chroot.
  3. To launch the standard Debian locales selector, enter dpkg-reconfigure locales.
  4. Select any locales you wish to add to the chroot using the space key. Make sure to take note of the full locale name. Once you are finished, hit enter.
    • In this example, Portuguese is added.
  5. Select your default locale you wish to use. Warning - LTSP sometimes ignores the default locale, so a few extra steps are needed.
  6. To force the default, first open the main Raspbian lts.conf file using sudo nano /etc/lts.conf.
  7. Inside the file, navigate to the bottom and add the line LDM_LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8" (replacing en_US.UTF-8 with the locale you added earlier). Once finished, exit out of Nano by entering ctrl+x, y, enter.
  8. Finally, recompress the chroot by from inside the PiNet control panel, selecting Other followed by NBD-recompress or enter ltsp-update-image /opt/ltsp/armhf

LibreOffice (Portuguese example)

To add a locale to LibreOffice, follow this example for Portuguese.

  1. Open a terminal on the server.
  2. Enter sudo ltsp-chroot --arch armhf to enter the Raspbian chroot.
  3. Install LibreOffice localization and help files.
    • Enter apt-get install -y libreoffice-l10n-pt libreoffice-help-pt.
  4. Install localized ‘hunspell’ dictionary.
    • Search for localized version of hunspell. E.g. ‘hunspell-pt_PT’.
    • Download, extract, and copy files. NOTE: These instructions are an EXAMPLE and will vary based on search results.
    • Enter cd /tmp to change to temporary directory.
    • Enter wget http://natura.di.uminho.pt/download/sources/Dictionaries/hunspell/hunspell-pt_PT-20170615.tar.gz to download archive.
    • Enter tar xvzf hunspell-pt_PT-20170615.tar.gz to extract files from archive.
    • Enter cp hunspell-pt_PT-20170615/pt_PT* /usr/share/hunspell/ to copy files to correct destination.
    • Enter rm -r ./hunspell-pt_PT-20170615.tar.gz ./hunspell-pt_PT-20170615 to delete temorary downloaded archive and extracted directory.
  5. Enter exit to exit chroot environment.
  6. Finally, recompress the chroot by from inside the PiNet control panel, selecting Other followed by NBD-recompress or enter ltsp-update-image /opt/ltsp/armhf