Re: Good CJK distro

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jake" == Jake Morrison <jacob.morrison@example.com> writes:

On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    Jake> I would just like to have fully functional web browsing
    Jake> (e.g., ability to see localized text on buttons, ability to

Ah.  That I don't know about; my web browser is wget.  ;-)  This
shouldn't be distro dependent.  I doubt any browser is up to snuff on
input, though; the X Input Method model is really not sufficient to
multilingual use.  You'll probably need separate invocations of
LANG=ja, LANG=cn, LANG=kr Netscapes for multilingual input.  Watch for
IIIMP-supporting browsers.

    Jake> enter data), text editing and the ability to use some
    Jake> console-mode applications. And I am starting to localize
    Jake> some Qt apps I have written. So I can get useful work done
    Jake> even if only parts of the system are working.

Text editing I only know Mule; either XEmacs or GNU Emacs should be
fine.  Console mode should be doable in KTerm with appropriate font
selection if your apps will output ISO-2022 7bit.  If not, I guess
you'll have to mix kterm, cterm, and hanterm.  But that shouldn't be
distro dependent, either.

    Jake> I could probably switch my office machine over to Debian
    Jake> unstable, just as long is it was still usable for
    Jake> development work and didn't crash too often (nobody belives
    Jake> my uptime claims anyway :-).

Ah, no question about that; I did have a crash immediately after I
first installed XF86 4.0.1, but I did not reboot to start XF86 the
first time, and I did have some configure problems that may have
destabilized things.  Since that reboot I've had no crashes.

I have had substantial instability in the Coda server and client.
This is experimental software, and it probably has more to do with the
2.4 kernel I'm running (in search of VM improvements; swapping is down
for me although I hear varying reports) than with the Debian woody stuff.

    Jake> Is "unstable" likely to become more stable in the near
    Jake> future?

You'd have to ask a Debian developer about that; you could check the
web site.  FWIW, a _ton_ of KDE stuff came in about a month ago with
the resolution of the Qt licensing thing, glibc 2.2 was added about
that time, and XF86 4.0 just a week ago.  I can't imagine what could
be in the pipeline to keep that kind of instability continuing.

    Jake> What's the easiest way to get it installed?

Upgrade from 2.2.  I use apt from dselect.

    Jake> Is it possible to upgrade from 2.2?

I don't know how easy it will be.  Be careful in dselect; radical
upgrades with broken dependencies can cause dselect to decide to
unselect practically your whole system.  Learn about the `D' and `Q'
keys.  ;-)  Be prepared to spend a half day on the upgrade; with not
too much luck things will go very smoothly and you can ignore the
machine during the download and configure stages.  But there are
potential problems that may require a lot of admin intervention.

You will need a _lot_ of space in /var/cache/apt to do it all at
once.  Alternatively, you can "hold" everything in "extra" and
"optional" and reduce the space requirements by quite a bit.

If you've got the space, though, it might not be a bad idea to just
mount a 1GB (for 100% redundancy) partition on /var/cache/apt/archives
and let her rip (^^;;;;


-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."