Re: Good CJK distro

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> writes:

>     Tobias> Does anyone know if there is a project to improve
>     Tobias> multilanguage console support ?
> 
> Mule eterm.el?  ;-)
> 
> Or do you mean the Linux console?  You could do it in the framebuffer,
> but it will be a bit of work to get the fonts and so on.  You also
> have to make some decisions about how to handle the aspect ratio
> problem (normally Western alphabetic scripts have approximately a 2:1
> aspect ratio, but Asian ideographic scripts are 1:1).

kon2 (uses svgalib) and jfbterm (uses the framebuffer) work fine
for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. But you have to choose one of these
languages, you can't use them simultaneously.

Usually you have to edit the config file /etc/kon.cfg or
/etc/jfbterm.conf to select the desired language.

I recently patched kon2 a little bit so that it became possible to
use

    ~$ LANG=ja_JP kon

to start it in Japanese mode and

    ~$ LANG=ko_KR kon

to start it in Korean mode. I also merged in the support or Korean
hangul input from han2 (which is a fork of kon2 only for Korean).
Unforutunately I could not reach the author of kon2, it would be nice
to include this into the upstream sources.

I have not yet tried Chinese in kon, but I think I just have to add
the appropriate fonts then

    ~$ LANG=zh_CN.gb2312 kon

and

    ~$ LANG=zh_TW.big5

should work too.

jfbterm has been developed based on kon, the code has a lot in common
with kon. It is probably not very difficult to merge support for
Korean input into jfbterm as well and make it select the language
based on the LANG variable. But I didn't have time to do it yet.

So there is no real multiligual support for the Linux console yet,
but you can switch between many languages.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>