Slashdot Mirror
Reading/Writing Chinese Using Linux?
Rimbo asks: "I'm building a computer for a friend, who has three major requirements from his system: He wants an Athlon with a 333MHz FSB, he wants absolutely no Microsoft software anywhere near it, and he needs the ability to read and edit Chinese. I imagine Red Flag Linux has great Chinese support, but is it as easy to use as a desktop OS as Mandrake or Red Hat? How easy is Chinese text editing and entry under the major distributions? What "office" software for Linux is good for editing Chinese? Thanks!"
Rice Linux
Google is your friend.
m l
http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Chinese-HOWTO.ht
Abiword has good i18n support, and I'm almost positive I've seen a screenshot of Abiword in Chinese. I'd also imagine that GNOME 2 would support Chinese pretty well if properly configured, thanks to all the new Pango/Unicode stuff..
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I imagine that he also wants a traditional, Chinese keyboard for his computer. As the Chinese alphabet has over a thousand characters, he might need to have one custom built.
Maybe now I can start reading all this freaking spam I get in weird looking characters :)
DDR333 only runs at 166.6MHz not 333MHz that's what where the first D in DDR comes in - Double Data Rate, as in 2 bits for each cycle instead of one like the old SDR (I bet you can figure out what that acronym stands for all by yourself).
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Linux in order to "corner the market" needs to be completely usable in all major world languages, heck all languages. not just supported but "usable"
Wouldn't this be more appropriate if it was posted on the Japanese Slashdot, http://slashdot.jp/? I mean, Japan isn't China, but I'm sure they'd be better at relating to that kind of environment...
Try Red Flag Linux. It's a Chinese distro, so your friend will be able to read, write, etc in Chinese.
No, I found it much more difficult to use. Everything is in Chinese!!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Check out .
Yangchunbaixue KDE Chinese Environment or YKCE is a hybridly licensed software that turns Red Hat Linux 7.1 into a sophisticated Chinese KDE desktop environment.
Sounds like someone got an OCR'd copy of Harry Potter's latest adventures.
Jah-Wren is a NEWBIE. He just figure out what SDR stands for.
...and since I've had to write and test all of my PHP applications with the Japanese charset for him and his friends, I thought I would share my and his experiences.
I've done both Japanese and Chinese input editing with Windows and MacOS 9, and my client uses Japanese input the majority of the time he uses a PC. He and his friends flatly refuse to use anything but Windows 2000 for hardcore input. The reason? Microsoft's Japanese IME. Mac OS 9's input support doesn't compare to this tiny bar that sits at the corner of your screen and lets you flip back and forth between English and several other character sets. According to my client, both mouse support (i.e. clicking the little bar and bringing up the language) and keyboard support (using key commands to change languages) are VASTLY more efficient in Windows 2000 than in MacOS 9. In fact, he's planning to drop his (older) Macs for Windows 2000 and XP machines solely based on this feature.
Now, I'm not saying that there isn't something similar for Linux. But if Apple couldn't come up with anything more productive for MacOS 9, which was intended from the start to be a consumer-level, desktop, OS, I am highly doubtful that Linux developers can come up with anything better. As is, my client and all of his friends are on either 2000 or XP and are quite happy with their decision.
As it stands, I believe your friend's decision to not use Microsoft products may be a bit short-sighted, especially considering that this is one of my client's only reasons to switch to Windows from MacOS.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
http://linuxpr.com/releases/4175.html
Another reason to use Mozilla (and block popups).
Mac OS_X is the best unix variant on the market for client use. it has a fucntional GUI that comercial vendors are actually writting apps for and it supports serveral languages including two variations of chinese.
s al os.html
English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Brazilian-Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean
http://www.apple.com/macosx/whatyoucando/univer
And how the hell do you get them to work with most applications?
The same issue for chinese exists for Korean and Japanese, and is one of my major reasons for NOT moving to linux.
Windows et. al. have this issue down to nothing, I can use Japanese in every program installed on my PC (that has windows handle the UI), but basic input of Japanese into linux seems almost impossible.
One site wanted me to recompile the kernel just to add the suport. Another wanted me to rebuild all of my system libraries.
Multilingual support for Asian languages is severely lacking in Linux.
And I've tried Turbolinux, and on boot into X I got FVWM. That's REAL advanced.
A few things I mentally noted while reading this:
a) I find it interesting how the "friend" mentioned in the article only specifies the brand and FSB frequency of the CPU of the system he wants. Most people would be more interested in things like the CPU clock speed, hard drive size, amount of RAM, et cetera. Also, having a high-speed front side bus does in no way gurantee a fast system.
b) The link to the A7V333. Maybe I just had bad luck with my A7V, but I have woved never to buy an Asus product again after experiencing their horrible drivers, horrible support and in many cases badly designed products. My friends have had similar experiences, mostly with Asus 3D cards. I would not recommend Asus products to my worst enemy, and I would NOT put an Asus motherboard in a computer I built for a friend.
c) Windows has excellent multi-language input support. Refusing to use Microsoft software is not in the best interest of someone who wants his chinese input support as good as possible. Not that there can't be good Chinese support in a Linux distro (I wouldn't know, having never researched the subject) but there is always the ease-of-use problem, which the posting also mentions.
d) Finally, I'd say the OS Sucks-Rules-O-Meter is more of an indication of the amount of zealots for any given operating system than anything else. Also, it'd be interesting to see how much overlap there is between the "linux rules" and "windows sucks" result. I'm guessing quite a bit.
Speaking of the OSSROM, if it is to be believed, then apart from Windows, MacOS, OS/400, Solaris and Unix are all operating systems that suck.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
HACKED BY CHINESE
Offtopic? This is real-life experience with using Asian IMEs.
Moderators, pass the crack, please...
is to have the fortune program in your login script...
-RickTheWiseGuy
I only say this because the default install, when selecting Japanese as the primary language, worked right out the box for my wife. She's had no complaints (she actually loves the speed improvement over Windoze), although cannaserver, etc don't work exactly like windoze, but she picked it up quickly. Even the man pages are in Japanese. Need an English man page, simply do a
and you're in bidness.
I say all this GUESSING that the support for Chinese in Redhat will be just as good, if not better, as the Japanese support.
Oh, BTW, Abiword does do internationalization. As does Mozilla, Sylpheed (this thing rocks!), gqview. The basics are covered, but you probably already knew that.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
The chinese how-to will tell you what most of the software does. It's at the usual place - http://www.tldp.org.
Mandrake comes with
1. chinese input (both big5 and gb) with xcin.
2. cjk latex for editing (if you already know how to use latex, of course)
3. mozilla is big 5 (gb?) aware already
4. there's a chinese shell somewhere on the disk
5. emacs works with big5 input without xcin.
Fonts, locales and even some manpages and howtos also comes with the distribution. The only thing I haven't got working is actually displaying chinese in the title bars and window manager toolbars.
How come when I hit the parent link I don't get the parent comment? I just get more comments that are unrelated to the original comment.
is not looking to the future and where Microsoft is headed with its product cost.
When I buy a piece of electronic equipment I do not expect to have to keep paying for the privilege of using it.
Microsoft WILL come up with an enforced subscription system for their OS's, and schemes like Palladium may just end up forcing that on everyone, after all if you are a "standard" windows user (like my parents and hell I wouldn't want to force them offline by making my dad have to learn Linux) palladium looks like a good thing, secure and "hey its built into what I use anyway".
So the answer is for people to TRY the alternatives - sure they may not be so pretty, or have all the functions, but then thats why Open Source works - if something is "missing" contact the developers and they will probably implement it if its something they missed, sure it might not be available immediately but you will have contributed.
Palladium will kill that kind of interaction, and make software (and some hardware) the sole juristiction of Microsoft.
This is not an anti-Microsoft rant, but it s one about freedom, something that those in the US celebrated 2 days ago, and those in China wish they had more of.
Well nuff said.
You will be screwing your friend, since that MOBO only supports a 200 or 266FSB. It does however, support memory running at 333mhz (pc2700). Not quite the same thing.
I'm building a computer for a friend, who has three major requirements from his system: He wants an Athlon with a 333MHz FSB, he wants absolutely no Microsoft software anywhere near it, and he needs the ability to read and edit Chinese.
Then go DL www.freebsd.org. They have a whole list of Chinese software.
Opera Software today continued its Linux Bonanza Week with a public release of Opera 6.02 for Linux. The new version includes important fixes to the document and user interface, with special emphasis on the display of Asian characters, making this an important upgrade for Linux users all over the world.
More at: http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2002/07/2002 0703_2.html
and...
Opera waves the red flag in China
In China, the government has moved to install the open-source Linux operating system provided by Red Flag in an attempt to avoid reliance on U.S. companies, particularly Microsoft. The successful RedFlag formula will now be replicated in the embedded market.
"After dominating the Chinese desktop market, RedFlag is now poised to move into the embeddded market," says Danny Huang, geveral manager embedded products, Redflag Software Technologies Co., Ltd. "With Opera on board as a partner, RedFlag now offers the very best in embedded systems solutions for the Chinese market."
Press release here: http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2002/07/2002 0701_2.html
They were one of the first general Linux distros with DBCS support and the product has simplified and traditional Chinese support.
Moron asks: "Hi, a... uh... 'friend' of mine wants to be attractive to the opposite sex. He refuses to take a shower, change his clothes, or brush his teeth. Any suggestions?"
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
duh
Or maybe I should say "was great". I used cxterm (Chinese xterm) under RedHat 5.0. Its input methods were great, it had some data files containing common multi-character combinations, so if you typed one or two characters, it would show you a list of guesses about what character it thought comes next, and quite often the one I wanted would be right there at the top of the list.
However, I've never been able to get it working under later versions of RedHat, i.e. RH6. I think it has something to do with the way termcap stuff was changed; under RH6, cxterm's display keeps getting mangled. I tried recompiling the sources, and I even tried just taking a statically linked executable built under RH5 and running on RH6, and it still doesn't work. In fact, I keep my old laptop running RH5, mainly so I can ssh into it and run cxterm remotely.
But the emacs that comes with later versions of RedHat can display Chinese pretty well. You want to be sure you've got the emacs-leim package installed. Emacs also has some Chinese input methods, but I can't seem to find the documentation for them, so I haven't been able to try them out yet.
The AthlonXP doesn't have a 333MHz FSB, not even the new 0.13u release, it's still 266MHz the 333MHz simply refers to the memory bus.
And the point of having a larger memory bus that's not matched by the FSB is? Well... bragging rights?
Yanks against the wall with a bullet between the eyes.
I've tried to get xcin to work on slackware and debian, and I never could get it to work. Most of the documentation is written in (you guessed it) chinese. Everytime I get the XCIN error:
/etc/xcinrc:
XCIN (Chinese XIM server) version 2.5.3-pre2.
(module ver: 20010918, syscin ver: 20000210).
(use "-h" option for help)
xcin: locale "C" encoding "ansi_x3.4-1968"
xcin: error:
locale section "C": DEFAULT_IM: value not specified.
Go figure.
DDR333 is here now, but you won't see a 333MHz FSB until Hammer hits the scene. According to Toms' Hardware, you won't even see it in Barton. While a DDR333 connection to the northbridge might be nice for smp setups, it'll be wasted connected by a 133 MHz DDR interface to one cpu. It'll help, just not as much as it should.
I'm using Debian with working Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Basically you have you sort out locale packages, fonts, and then inputing method (XIM), and lastly the apps you want to use chinese.
For locale, most distributions include proper and working locale packages. So all you have to do is install them. Locale packages are related to glibc btw. The way locale packages work has changed a bit from glibc 2.1 to 2.2. But anyway both work well.
And then for fonts. Most of the time, you need both X fonts (.bdf files) and truetype fonts. Both are quite easy to get on the net if your distribution of Linux doesn't include them. They are all in Debian, for example. And I think a chinese distribution like RedFlag will include a bunch of them.
For chinese, I use xcin for inputing. It supports big5 and gb encoding, and also all sorts of common inputing method, such as changjei, bopomofo, cantonese, etc. There are also people developing custom inputing method you can use with xcin, such as smartcj
Finally, applications to use. To start with, I think it's a must to have a terminal which works with the language you need. For example, I have crxvt (chinese rxvt). And so I can run all sort of text based programs with chinese working straight away.
Most of the time all you need is to do:
export LANG=zh_TW.Big5 XMODIFIERS=@im=xcin
for your environment. Run the inputing method, and then run your applications. Most applications will work pretty well with XIM.
For office software, I've tried Openoffice.org only, with inputing working. Sometimes it is buggy, but usable. As long as you have truetype fonts installed and Openoffice.org knows about those fonts, you're sorted. Printing works straight away too. While, Staroffice doesn not work properly with XIM, for some reasons.
I haven't tried any chinese linux distribution, but I imagine they might be even much more easier to setup for chinese.
Just a note for Japanese and Korean. I have kinput2 with canna server, kterm for Japanese. hanterm and ami for Korean. Both kinput2 and ami work with Openoffice.org, too.
If you have the source, you have the whole world...
Try Linpus
From the recent press release:
Linpus Linux 8.2 is out: " Linpus Technologies, Inc is proud to announce the release and availability of the Linpus Linux 8.2 desktop and server operating system. Some of the main features include use of UNICODE throughout applications, compliance with LSB 1.1 specifications, better hardware compatibility and much improved Chinese input and printing. Read the Linpus product pages (English or Chinese) for more information."
See http://www.linpus.com/product/linux-8.2.htm
"Advanced Chinese Support
All aspects of Chinese usage are now fully supported. This includes input, printing and working environment in both simplified and traditional Chinese as well as various input methods. A lot of effort went into making sure that offices wishing to move to Linux can do so without much productivity loss."
There are 2 ISOs, download details at:
http://www.linpus.com/download.htm
If you want fairly good Chinese support I think you can try Turbolinux 7 - they are bigger then Redhat in China because they have a much better chinese input method support and stuff - and I have tried it myself! You can switch between chinese and english just like that!
Redflag Linux, not to be redundant, is the ideal candidate. As for weather it is as high quality and feature rich as the "big" distros. Well here is a review of the english redflag distro. It looks impressive. Undoubtably the Chinese version is much better the English one.
P.S. No one loves you. Not even your "mom". Not even Santa Clause. Not even Social Services. Not even God. Infact, God hates you.
Use the distro from Linpus: http://www.linpus.com/product/linux-8.2.htm
/ in dex.html#zhtw
Open Office:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.0
And simply order a keyboard from ANY Chinese computer shop:
http://www.kingtech.com.tw/readme1.asp
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
I have set up a Chinese environment under Debian - it works beatifully, easily better than any Chinese input/output system under Windows. The key ingredients:
/etc/locale.gen includes the zh_CN GB2312 line (or equivalnet Big5 traditional encoding) and run locale-gen
* KDE 2.2.2
* ttf-arphic-* true type fonts (traditional and simplified are available)
* XCIN, with a little tweaking to get it working properly - does Pinyin input, which most people prefer
* locales - make sure your
* environment variables - there is a Debian Chinese HOWTO which tells you what you need to set.
The key thing is the fonts (turn on anti-aliasing in KDE, make sure your X windows is set up to support this). The Arphic AA fonts look utterly magnificent, easily the best chinese fonts around. KDE supports X input (i.e. XCIN) quite happily, so you can use KOffice etc. and type in Chinese without a problem.
One of these days I'll get around to writing a HOWTO to explain exactly how it works - if you want details, pester me by e-mailing daniel at ieee dot uow dot edu dot au.
Although I can't speak from personal experience, you'll probably wan to check out Hancom Office (http://www.hancaom.com/ or Chinese http://www.hancom.com.tw/) for an office suite. It's a commercial suite by a Korean company and will likely have better Chinese support than open suites.
I am at this moment using Red Hat 7.0 with CLE,
the Chinese Linux Extensions, version 1.0. For
Chinese in console mode, it has jmcce; in X, both
KDE and GNOME have been pretty thoroughly
localized, though I prefer mwm and rxvt. Chinese
input is no problem with a standard keyboard;
there are more input methods than you can shake a
stick at. We also bought the Hancom Office suite.
Made for Asian languages, and more to my tastes
than StarOffice or anything else I've seen.
You can buy the 333 boards, and the 2700 memory, but AMD processors don't actually support anything better than a 133DDR=266 FSB speeds. You will only see a very marginal improvement in performance between 266 and 333 at this point in time. But the good thing is that AMD will come out with 166ddr=333 FSB support sometime soon, and popping one of these new processors in your existing mobo will allow true 333 FSB speeds.
RedHatis aparently shipping their latest LIMBO release with UTF-8 locales as the default. This is actually pretty impressive and somewhat scary. A lot of software supports UTF-8 but it's not been proven unlike the region specific encodings like ISO-8859's. I think the big hold up was Bash but apparently that's been worked out. I don't know if this helps with Chinese though. A suspect a lot of programs meant to be used with Chinese probably do so by using a locale specific to Chinese (and not UTF-8) but I'm straining my knowledge of the topic.
I got Japanese support working after some time, for chinese it's basically the same:
:)
1.) get yourself the Microsoft Uni MS TTF
2.) install kinput2, canna and cannaserver
3.) read the how-tos linked in previous comments
4.) set all the X-Applications to using the font in 1.
5.) create yourself a shortcut which sets a few environment variables and then open all your applications in it
6.) you can switch on/off kanji-input by typing +
done
Mac OS X can do everything you're asking and a lot more, all in glorious Chinese. It will even let you run X-Windows so you can get even FARTHER away from MS than just "MS-free." I'm no troll, but for the life of me I can't figure out why this wasn't the FIRST suggestion, since it's by far the best and easiest. Okay, it doesn't run on an AMD (well, Darwin does, of course, but ...), but it's a better solution (didn't say cheapest, did I?) than any I've seen offered so far.
Someone mod this up...
We played with a lot of different distros and versions in both Taiwan ( Big 5 Char Set) and China (GB Char Sets) over the years. What we found is that Mandrake 8.x supports pretty well out of the box with a little tweaking. Check out some screenshots: http://mandrake.hemeihr.com/ We installed some extra Chinese fonts (there is a serious lack of pretty simplified and traditional Chinese fonts that are copylefted), and the staff gets work done WITHOUT any MS junkola on the 20+ linux boxen in China.
:)
It is fast, Chinese is attractive, and it seems pretty stable. The development guys have been preaching about it over the past two weeks.
Open Office supports both simplified and traditional char sets in version 1.0, very nice.
Turbolinux is alright, but we found the distro behind in general app versioning AND a bit unstable compared with Mandrake.
Redflag is still not there either, but is improving slowly. Not really good for a good working environment yet.
We just recently installed RedHat 7.3 in Chinese on two boxes, it may be our distro of choice if further tests are as smooth as our initial findings
Oh yeah, KDE3 in Chinese rocks. Gnome 2.0 in Chinese is OK.
My 1.9 cents.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
What? I can't believe I see people praising Microsoft here. Even though their software is good, they're evil, right?
*
"Yanks against the wall with a bullet between the eyes." ...and this gets modded as 3:funny...
what a fucking crock of commie bullshit this site is...
cant wait for the next story:
chinese commie anime-watching linux geeks are our overlords.
the war's over...you lost...HARD...
Stupid AMD hasn't released anything past 266FSB
and won't be for the for seeable future: Barton, Hammer.
Chinese is an old language.
Stop being stubborn and face the fact its stupid to use it. and face the relality ENGISH is better and just accept it and use it like the rest of the world.
I seen stuff about the problems of the chinese language countless times now, why cant u just give it up
Hancom is based in Korea and has what is supposed to be an excellent office suite that does Korean, Japanese, Chinese (simplified & traditional) and Arabic. The also sell Hancom Linux, which is Red Hat 7.1 w/KDE all configed to one of the above languages.
They are also into Zarus PDA software and at one time were discussing partnership with The Kompany.
Check out http://www.hancom.com/ for more details. You might also want to check out TurboLinux, which is supposed to be big in Asia-Pacific.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You should really seek help from a lawyer instead of asking the Slashdot crowd for help.
My $0.02
There is a list of Chinese distros [distrowatch.com] here and distrowatch also mentions the major distros [distrowatch.com] that can handle Chinese. These are Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian and Turbo Linux.
yes google is your friend
but please people just use unicode for everything
you just have to have an editor that will do unicode and have your fonts set up right (since their is no free unicode set that would be hard) I use xemacs so what do I know
regards
john jones
What is Unicode?
Is there a significant number of contributors to Linux writing in Chinese?
What app(s) under Linux actually let you print the Chinese?! Or Japanese, or Cyrillic, or Hebrew, or... I've not seen a browser yet that will print a page in charset gb2312, koi8, etc. They display fine, but printing is worthless. UNFORTUNATELY, MS IE works perfectly.
BTW, most major distributions (Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, etc) already have fair support for Far-East languages such as Chinese and Japanese. Just install some fonts and locales, and change your $LANG to the language you desire. If everything goes well, you should have your system up and running in you language. For Chinese input, use XCIN (I'm not sure about Japanese and other languages), and if I remember correctly OpenOffice supports Far-East languages natively.
Where linux may suffer a little bit is in the areas of printing and uniform input support across all applications (for example, skk only works in emacs). However, for writing Japanese-page php scripts, emacs is quite sufficient. Redhat 7.3 even includes skk by default, so you don't have to do anything special to install it.
The story with Chinese is a little bit different ... I've been looking for about six years and I have not found anything in linux that matches the ease and comprehensiveness of Chinese language support in Windows 2000. So for anybody (such as the story poster) who is looking to handle Chinese in Linux: it can be done, but it is probably not as easy as in Windows.
Sometimes Microsoft breeds them. They don't need to be brainwashed by outside forces.
.NET desktop or whatever they will call this POS coming down the pike.
Look, I'm an MCSE. I spent a year learning Windows 2000 inside and out. I knew even more than some of my teachers when I was done. Recently I have been doing contract work with an eCommerce company which is almost 100% a Windows shop. There are a few Macs there, but mostly everyone's running on Windows.
One of the things I'm doing there is an inventory. We need to match up licenses on the machines. Some are running the original OSes they were running when the company got them. This usually means Windows 98, Windows 98SE and (Goddess help me) Millenium Edition. Some have been moved up to Windows 2000, and that's where the "match the license to the machine" game comes in.
Then there's the servers which are a completely different kettle of fish. I suspect the company will be buying a few more licenses before all this is over.
If the whole shop was Macintosh it wouldn't be a problem. No serial number, no certificate, no BSA assholes looking for people to nail. But no, they can't do that..."we can't go backwards" says my boss.
Similarly, if they went Open Source it wouldn't be a problem...in fact, it would have been even easier. It no longer becomes a question of which machine has a legitimate operating system...you could use one disk for everyone and it would be all good. It's the way it used to be with MacOS...up until System 7.0.1 MacOS was free as in beer. Of course there are other advantages with Open Source software, however, they don't usually matter to suits.
Dealing with XP is a pain, and so are programs with similar "Activation" schemes like Office 2000 and Office XP. But will they let me slap on Open Office 1.0 instead? "We have to be compatible with what's out there." the boss says to me. Never mind that to be compatible with what's out there you have to spend $600/seat. Never mind that trifle. You have to "be compatible with what's out there."
And if this crap isn't hard enough now, just wait until Palladium rolls in, and you have to not only deal with broken software but broken hardware too. This will become the ultimate "lock in"...you won't be able to run something that doesn't have the crypto signatures the hardware is expecting. Goodbye Linux, goodbye FreeBSD, goodbye OpenBSD, goodbye NetBSD, goodbye BeOS. That new Dell you just bought will only run on MS DRM OS. Or Windows 2004 or XP 2 or
Forget the fact that I have been using Macs since 1995. I was using DOS well before that. Longer than I care to admit, actually. I actually LIKE Windows 2000...it is a nice, solid operating system that is very hard to crash. But the thing is, the ancillary bullshit surrounding Microsoft's sales terms and copy locks make anti-MS zealots out of all but the most sheepish followers of Redmond.
I am looking to wean myself personally from Microsoft. I will probably still support it where I work, wherever that may be. I am, after all, an MCSE. But once there's video and audio apps in Linux that rival Vegas Video, Premiere, ProTools, Sound Forge and After Effects I am dropping Windows like a bad habit. And I will be glad when I do.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I've looked everywhere for a Chinese HOWTO with Debian. Only one I see is the standard one which doesn't include any distro specific information.
Not officially anyway, Athlons run at either 100 or 133 MHz (double pumped) for an effective 200 or 266 MHz. There are some mobo's that let you overclock the FSB to 333 MHz and beyond but the performance increase is only a few percent really.
Some of those links talk about software that can not be found anymore. I'm studying Japanese (slowly), and have yet to find any software (other than Mozilla that displays CJK correctly) that I can use to write Japanese. There were a few that mentioned adding the fonts using some export commands, which I plan on trying soon.
Although some of the requirements in the article were a bit far-fetched (333 FSB, etc.), I don't think the Linux/BSD requirement was a bad one. My laptop runs Slackware Linux 8.0 just dandy (now if my 2.4.18 kernel would stop killing my PCMCIA lancard when I compile APM in, I'd be happy). There are some things that are lacking from the Linux variants of software (for example, the statistics portion of StarOffice--StarCalc is heavily lacking when compared to the statistics capability in MS Excel), but as with everything in the Open Source world, there's always something else in the works. Sometimes it just pays off to be patient with the Open Source community (for example, look at the progress that the ALSA team has brought to soundcard support under Linux).
Good luck in your hunt for the ultimate Chinese-AMD-Linux box...
[RnK]Tessai
For better or worse, it's your life or your purse...
http://www.xteamlinux.com.cn/ Got a free CD with this when I bought a computer in China.... no idea if it is good or not - my Chinese reading skills are a few words higher than nothing. - HeXa
Notwithstanding all the "Linux trolls" who post "search Google" and "Here's a Chinese input project, it must be good," Linux just can't do Chinese (or Japanese) now.
Let's put this in perspective. I've been Microsoft-free personally for about 5 years now. Both my laptops and all my workstations (at home and work) run Linux. That's about five machines running Linux now. I'm very happy.
My wife knows nothing about computers. She doesn't know Windows, she doesn't know Linux. So I can install Linux for her, right? Wrong.
Because Chinese input for Linux simply isn't as good as Microsoft Win2K.
As the parent points out, the Microsoft Asian-input methods are well-thought out. They allow you to seamlessly shift into and out of English and Chinese (and Japanese).
Chinese itself has at least three major input methods, each of which is a long, complicated process to implement. My wife reads/writes "Traditional Chinese" (what they read/write in Taiwan) as opposed to "Simplified Chinese" (what they read/write in China and what Red Flag Linux certainly only supports).
Microsoft Win2K handles all Chinese and Japanese input methods so well that my wife and others who are actually from Mainland China are all happy.
Linux doesn't seem to make anyone happy.
Sure, there are projects out there. As the Linux Troll with a highly-rated comment mentioned earlier, "Search Google!" -- yeh, you'll get tons of hits, and every one of them will be a waste of your time.
Maybe in another year or two.
I'd be happy if someone who's actually used Chinese input on Linux and Win2K tell me there's something as good for Linux. I'll try it in a heartbeat. I've been waiting YEARS to get my wife off of Windows.
Note: All this rant doesn't say much about Chinese *OUTPUT* -- Linux seems to display Big5 (traditional) and other Chinese/Japanese just fine. It's the input that's not ready yet.
fifth sigma, inc.
Your friend is a communist!
AMD current chips and its next generation Hammer (64-bit) will/has only a 266MHz FSB.
:(
There is nothing else to say, SORRY
But yes, it will support the new DDR-333. Also - it won't be until the Barton chip that AMD will have 512kb of L2 cache (currently only at 256kb)
your wrong.
The athlon processor has a FSB speed of 133MHz, this bus is DDR, with an effective speed of 266MHz
The VIA KT333 chipset supports 166MHz DDR RAM, with an effective speed of 333MHz
This does not make it a 333MHz FSB in any way shape or form
Linux handles Chinese very well.
A localized distibution probably
has lots of fun items in it, and
that would be the best to use
if your friend is not a Unix-oriented
person.
Others without a localized setup
might do well to use Yudit
(http://www.yudit.org) an editor
that can handle and convert
between utf-8, big-5, gb
and all other encoding. Very
useful when dealing various
flavors of Chinese data.
For an "office" type app,
Openoffice
(http://www.openoffice.org)
is the way to go. Just set up
the fonts and encoding
settings and off you go.
Cedictlookup is a difficult-to-find
but very nice Chinese<->English
dictionary. Bit of a memory hog,
but it does a good job and
works in both Big-5 and GB.
Tony Laszlo, Tokyo
How much of this CJK work runs on FreeBSD? I use FreeBSD on all my systems.
I have been using RedHat 7.2 (now 7.3) with Chinese input and editing for quite a while and I have created a mini HOWTO, I think you will find it useful:
e _mini-HOWTO.html
http://www.aucs.org/rpmcenter/RedHat_72_73_Chines
As for Office software, I use OpenOffice.org 1.0 Chinese.
Yes!
AbiWord has great Chinese support because of the guys at.
http://www.thizlinux.com/.
Click on the link and check them out. They're very cool and have a great Chinese versions of Linux and AbiWord.
Cheers
Martin Sevior
AbiWord Developer
:o)
If I remember correctly, SuSE (at least 7.3 and 8.0) has an option to install a Chinese system.
I've used the Japanese (yes, I know they are different) setup for Linux before and my only complaint was that the IME functionality was not very intuitive or easy to see. I imagine you'll find the same problem with Chinese.
There are third party IMEs available for inputing Japanese under Linux (like ATOK) which a very nice, so I would guess there are similar products available for inputing Chinese.
If you can find a t-code keyboard and the proper character set it shouldn't be a problem, although
I'm not sure if t-code is for Chinese or kanji, but aren't the two similar?
-troy
As per my anecdotal experience, I'd say forget about ever getting Chinese to work on any distro that isn't native 100% Chinese.
:( ) Not to mention character support in every fricking X app, including Abiword and all the other billion others you'd probably have to specifically recompile for it on another disto.
I've tried every fricking FAQ and HOWTO I can find, and have neither gotten Chinese or Japanese to ever work on Mandrake. Something always goes wrong, some insane problem that I don't even know what is wrong nor how to debug it. The only "support" I have then, is from the CXterm which is decent, but last I downloaded it was hard to find and seemingly about to disappear because of old age..
On the other hand I test installed TurboLinux (I think) or something, a Chinese distro straight out, and anyway it was BEAUTIFUL. Even the console terminals had Chinese support (though I couldn't use characters in my login
I am not Chinese and do not speak Chinese, however I am working in China and was trying to introduce Linux. The following text treats Chinese == simplified, however most of the stuff should be valid for traditional too.
IntroductionFirst of all, Chinese under Linux is hell. There seem to be no people being interested in developing open source in China. And if they do then it's difficult to find, crappy and unfinished. Just look at the Mozilla 1.0 simplified Chinese translation, it's not there, the guys did not move since 0.9.8. The Chinese HOWTO is quite old (1998!) and most of the links are dead and the information inside useless (practical experience).
Red alternativesYou have several alternatives, I suggest you forget about them: RedFlag Linux (Experience based on 3.0, Redflag 3.2 beta ISO)
I had to use the text installation: I guess it was unicode without unicode support, so all I saw was messy characters but not Chinese. Somehow it's similar to redhat so I was able to click through. After the installation: whoops, the system is asking me for my registration key otherwise I can try RedFlag linux for 40 days (? do not remember how many exactly). It was not just a key, it was one of the Microsoft dimensions. After choosing the trial I ended up in Kde trying to look like windows. It had a tray, and a start bar, the Control Panel and so on. But I had a feeling it was there but it could not satisfy me, and I could not stand the little penguin patriotically holding that red flag up. The Chinese input seems to me to be the most advanced, but the system it self seemed to me unstable. Most modifications were in the interface and trying to lock down the system so you need to get that key after the trial period.
Office: RedOffice different company, same red. It's OpenOffice 1.0 looking like Office XP, that's all except there is no source code, no binaries, only a trial version and a price of 398RMB (~50US$) for the full version. Stick with Chinese OpenOffice.
Mandrake 8.2Mandrake has in my opinion the best Chinese support. You only need to install it using the Chinese language. If you install it using English and then switch to Chinese you will have several problems, like you desktop disappearing etc. Do not use Unicode, use gb or big5 only, I was not able to see anything by switching to Unicode.
After the installation you should have a Chinese kde, Chinese Mozilla 0.9.8 and some more software in Chinese. The best input for simplified is Chinput, for Big5 Xcin and that's how Mandrake is doing it, if you use gb you will get Chinput by pressing Ctrl+Space and Xcin on a Big5 system.
Turbolinux seems to have taken over the Chinput project, therefore you will find no info on the net. They made an extension to Chinput called ZWinPro (ZWinPro-3.2-11.i586.rpm) you need to forceinstall it (solve some libary deps, install unicon but do not uninstall Chinput) and forceinstall Mandrakes Chinput again. This will give you Mandrakes Chinput with a configuration toolbar and some binaries which allow you to use Chinese input for all applications. There are some minor probs you will need to fix (font alias missing, etc), if you have trouble contact me.
The only problem about Chinput (and probably Xcin) is: it's dumb, the windows input tries to guess what you are typing. Means, you need to write character by character on Linux, does not matter if you use Pinyin or Woubi (or what ever you call it). This is very unconvenient and a killer for every Chinese linux desktop. Nobody will want to type 10 min on Linux when he can be finished in 2 on windows.
Next get the Chinese version of OpenOffice1.0 and English Mozilla 1.0. If you want to use a Chinese browser stick to konqueror, Mozilla 0.9.8 is not stable and crashes randomly.
You will want to get some Chinese ttf fonts from windows, as the fonts on Mandrake are quite ugly.
paul
I find Mandrake for ease, Red Hat for usibility and SuSe for the option is a good mix. Mandrake and RH both work with Chinese. (Manderin, I'm sure, as it is the most popular.) The Chipset should work, but I'm from the States, Man. I've seen X work with Hangul (Korean), but I won't lie... here in Detroit we don't get much call from the polyglot crowd.
You can read all about Unicode's shortcomings (and its competitors) here and here.
There's a new input method system called Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework (IIIMF). It was released to the free software community by Sun just over 2 years ago. Currently it's hosted at Li18nux.
Among its advantages over the old X Input Method (XIM) system are:
Disclaimer: I am a voting member on the Li18nux Steering Commitee, and I'm also working on a commercial Chinese IIIMF input method for my employer.
The word "Kanji" in Japanese actually means "Han Characters". That is, Kanji is Han (Chinese) writing.
Nobody can say how many Kanji are there because nobody can really determined how many Han Characters are actually out there !
The estimations ranges from 70,000 to more than 200,000.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The url is at
http://linuxpr.com/releases/4175.html
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It is the fault of Slashdot's input box.
NOTE: I determined this after about 3 minutes of testing.
Oh, did I mention I'm surfing through webwasher.
I am a Chinese Linux user. The RedFlag, in actually, is a kind of Red Hat clone under GPL. Their main work is to just "rewrite" the Redhat installer with Chinese string, and replace the string "Red Hat" to "Red Flag" at the booting time. Other works include set language to chinese and pre-install some software like VCD player with chinese patch etc... There is not any good technology contribution to Linux... quite disappointed.
Chinese office ? Ah, there is a simliar thing, a "Chinese" distribution of OpenOffice. They changed the menu font to Chinese...etc. They said they have sorted the Chinese font warp/indent problem. That is
Most of the true linux users in China are using the linux distributions as same as the other users in the world: Redhat, Debian(few people use it), Mandrake(this one is quite welcome) and Slack.
One of the problems related to Chinese is about font rendering and font library. People usually use a M$ OEM font called simsun.ttf, which has included in the Redhat 7.3. However, when the font size 15, for displaying, the XFT should be disabled because rendering the Chinese chars under small font size will make them blur & unclean. XTT is a good alternative choice, but it lacks the large font support...:(
The Chinese input method problem totally is not related to technology. One of my classmates are working for a software company. The have developed a fantastic input method making Chinese input as fast as English's. However, they denied to develop a Linux version becaue of two reasons: Linux=no money profit/OpenSource (But their software price for windows just about 1 pound / 2 US.D) the second one is quite ridiculous: from the team leader to developers, all of them are Visual Studio/MFC slaves and HATE Linux... .
that's what I use (RH7.2). when installing, you have to select Chinese support (it's not by default), then if you set your preference of language for KDE to be Chinese, it'll take care of starting XIM (miniChinput) for X. Then, you press ctrl+space to switch to chinese input. there are many input methods of choice.
Contrarary to what some say, I found the miniChinput's PinYin input much better than WinXP's-maybe because I didn't bother to delve in the MS stuff. For example, in WinXP, after typing in all the letters for pinyin, if the character you're looking for is not among the first ten shown, you'll have to grab the mouse to flip to another set of characters, while in miniChinput, you could just press ">". Also the word associations seems more extensive and sensible in miniChinput than in MS Pinyin.
One downside though, a lot websites in mainland china are created towards IE users, with too much DHTML stuff and flash "ADnimations".
There is a chinese openOffice outfitter called RedOne office (ch2000.com.cn). I tried it and it handled Chinese editing pretty well-I never figured out what to set in OpenOffice so that it will know what I typed in was Chinese and apply the according rules for formatting the text (no period at start of line, and such.) However nowhere on ch2000.com.cn's website does it say that the final product would be freely downloadable, and the current beta version would supposably expire on 9/30/2002. Koffice is ok too, if inter-operativity isn't a crucial requirement.
if chinese input in text mode is needed, zhcon is the package you'd need. but I found it not too smoothe to use. Konsole in KDE 3 can handle chinese too, but it seems that there aren't many nice chinese fonts it could utilize.
you can put that memory bandwidth to good use. Normally, the asus board , using the via kt333 chipset, runs the fsb at 133MHz DDR and the memory bus at 166MHz DDR (if you have PC2700 memory). In order to get that extra memory bandwidth to the cpu, you have to increase the fsb clock to 166MHz DDR. If you're not into overclocking you cpu 25%, then you have to lower the clock mulitplier to compensate. The asus board offers a 1/5 clock divider for your pci bus so all your other devices can run in spec. Have fun :).
P.S. The MHz stuff.
MHz only means millions of cycles per second. Exactly what that means depends on how you define "cycle". If you're using the accepted definition of a cycle, in terms of memory, then you're talking about a cycle bounded by the event which occurs every time your bus does this:
_
/ \_/
(I'm not the best ascii artist but you get the idea) and the memory bus operates at 166MHz. However, if you're calling a cycle the event that occurs every time the bus can put a bit on a data line, then the memory bus operates at 333MHz. Either way, you're still going to get a maximum throughput of 2.7GB/s.
P.P.S.
If you want to change your fsb from 133MHz to 166MHz then you have to get a cpu with a rated frequency into which 166 will divide nicely. That means the XP 2000+ (1666MHz) or the XP 1500+ (1333MHz). If you get any other processor, you'll have to overclock or underclock a little since the cpu multiplier can only be set to multiples of 1/2.
you'll have to grab the mouse to flip to another set of characters
plus and minus are the shortcut keys for this function under windows.
it _is_ working!
dumbasses
I have a similar problem, a friend trying to learn both Hebrew and Linux. I did some research but so far I've found that many linux people in Israel prefer using English. Can somebody suggest how to set up a Hebrew Linux environment for non technical users?
The site's mostly in Japanese, but there's a blurb about a slightly older version of the OS here , product info here, and a screenshot in English mode here.
But hey, if the Linux route works, more power to you :)
P.S. -- Runs on standard x86 hardware, and Mozilla's been ported to it.
I'd tell him to buy a PowerMac G4 system and run Lotus Notes or WordPerfect ..... There "IS" Microsoft Office X which works awesome.
..
Microsoft on the Mac side is not at all the same beast as it is on the PC side. The Microsoft Mac programmers work much truer to spec than the PC programmers for Microsoft.
Internet Explorer on the Mac renders pages more like netscape does then IE on the PC. It's crazy. Things that Netscape complains about on and IE doesn't on the PC, IE on Mac complains also
If you look at the strokes package in XEmacs, then you'll see some support for Chinese characters. You can enter them in graphically with a pointer device (e.g. mouse, tablet, etc.) and then if you want, you can run a chinese character recognition program on them. At least, that's what I've done. I use an HMM (hidden Markov model) for analyzing the data. Unfortunately, there are on the order of 10k chinese characters, of which I've done about 1%. At some point, it would be nice to get character data from volunteers. Then all you'd need to do Chinese graphically on Linux would be XEmacs.
dave
I have used Linux combined with Chinese enviroment for a long time. I always think Gnome is the best, it is fast, flexible and easy to use. There is a trick. If you are not used to read Chinese menu, tool bar and prompt, you can change the locale setting from zh_CN.GB2312 to zh_CN in RedHat or Mandrake. You still can use Chinese, but menu and the other things will be English. It is very convenient.
.deb from debian website if you use debian.
I use Openoffice 1.0 for a while, it is great and very easy to add some new truetype fonts and utf8 fonts. And it is compatible with Chinese XIM(like Chinput). If you think Openoffice starts very slowly, you can download ooqstart-gnome from rpmfind.net or
Have any problem, e-mail me at river@linguistic-alchemy.com
CLE (Chinese Linux Extension) may be a good choice for you. Initially it was based on RH, then slackware,mandrake and SuSE are also supported. The newest version of CLE is called GAGA20020625, which is based on RH 7.3. You can find more information at CLE and download GAGA at ftp. For more information of Chinese support on Linux, check out the Linuxfab, which contains a forum on office suite for Linux.
I hope that RedFlag will have good support for traditional characters. The two major reasons for using simplified are now gone: 1) Some consider traditional characters easier to read and, now that we have keyboards, they are just as easy to write. 2) There are no longer any reasons to keep "the masses" from being able to read pre-communist documents encoded in the traditional characters.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Try this:
http://www.smipp.com/linuxlk.htm (lots of links to Chinese on everything Linux, including the deb flavor - which suits well my tastebuds too)
or this:
http://www.debian.org/intl/zh/
There's a distribution called Chinese 2000 which bundles with KaiOffice (an OpenOffice based). Chinese 2000 can handle both Big5 HKSCS & GB18030. I've used it for a period of time & it works fine.