[ipxe-devel] Wimboot: Lang selection through parameters?

[Melkor Lord]

On 27/09/2017 12:21, Christian Nilsson wrote:

> Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't each language added as a separate 
> index in boot.wim?

Not in my case. My source installation is pure en-US, hence the language 
packs. Boot.wim have 2 indexes. The 1st one is named "Microsoft Windows 
PE" and the 2nd one "Microsoft Windows Setup", but both in pure en-US.

> So adding index=x to the wimboot cmdline where x represents the index of 
> your preferred language should be an option.
> If it does not use different indexes then I guess it is an option that 
> you give via BCD, so having one BCD file for each language is probably 
> the fix you would want in that case.

Sometimes, we are so focused one solution that we overlook other 
possibilities! Your suggestion about different indexes for different 
languages is very nice! I feel a bit dumb not thinking about that in the 
first place.

Anyhow, I'm don't know (yet) how to modify the BCD to achieve the 
multilang goal. If you have any quick pointers, I'd be happy to check them.

But first, I'm gonna go with the indexes to support more than the 
default language.

> But I must ask, which parts of boot.wim do you actually need to have 
> language specific?

Mainly for error messages in case they occur. Some of the deployments 
will be distant and handled by someone else than me. Having native error 
messages can help.

There are other reasons but I didn't want to bloat the thread with more 
info than needed. In fact, besides the pure Windows setup thing, iPXE 
can serve a "Windows PE", loaded with some useful tools for disaster 
recovery and/or offline fixing of some issue.

As I don't want to maintain different boot.wim files for each language 
(some tools can't use another language than the OS default), I wanted to 
have one boot.wim with all needed languages buried in. For that, I 
needed a way to specify what language to use at boot time.

But now you mentioned the indexes, it seems to me that this is a 
perfectly viable solution. Thank you.

> I would suggest having boot.wim in English and when setup.exe kicks in 
> it will give you the language specified in unattended anyway?

That's currently the case. Boot.wim always boots with the default en-US 
language and fires up the Setup with a unattend.xml file. I get the 
"Setup is starting" message (in english) and as soon as the setup 
windows pops up, all messages use the correct language in the XML file.

-- 
Unix _IS_ user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.