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!"
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.
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.
...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!
All operating systems that support Chinese/Japanese/Korean use an IME allowing a user to input in characters using a standard 101/104 key keboard.
All 3000+ kanji in japanese and 20000+ in chinese can be input using a keyboard.
For chinese though, this is difficult due to the number, which is why MS Office is winning people over with the voice input system.
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.
They were one of the first general Linux distros with DBCS support and the product has simplified and traditional Chinese support.
All 3000+ kanji in japanese and 20000+ in chinese can be input using a keyboard.
well acttually japanese has way more than 3000 but there are 3000 that are the ones you are expected to know from a typical grade school...
my japanese teacher advised everyone is her class to download JWP (japanese word processor)... even though she only cares about what works i found it interesting that this "wappro" is released under the GPL... w00t... i know this is a bit off topic but i can say from personal experiance that it is possible to use a normal english 101/104 keyboiard to type in kanji... i dont use linux for this but im sure there are other that can do it
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Yanks against the wall with a bullet between the eyes.
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...
If you just want Japanese support and keep english dialogs and menus use:
Actually, in an A7V333 with a Palomino Athlon-XP, the FSB is still 133 Mhz. The ram runs at 166Mhz DDR, hence the 333 moniker, but the ram and the processor's FSB are asynchronous with each other.
11*43+456^2
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.
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?
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.
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.