[tlug] debian japanese

[Michael Moyle <michael@example.com>]

Some of you may remember me asking about using japanese characters with
debian. 

I was able to get it up and running, but there are some
hitches. Somtimes being on the cutting edge is a drag. 

Getting mutt to work was particularly aggravating. In the end it was
simple, and I am thankful for Frank Bennent's earlier posts. 

There are two basic things that need to happen to get mutt working once
all the fonts are intalled:

1. add 

set charset="euc-jp" 

to .muttrc

2. make sure your locale ($LANG environment variable) is set to
ja_JP.eucJP. For kterm and canna input, the LANG variable does not need
to be set. You can view japanese files and write kana's with LANG=C. 
For mutt it does. Too bad this wasn't documented anywhere. 

I am thinking of putting up a web site describing what I did. Does this
exist somewhere or will this be something new? Maybe I missed a relevant
site. What I would like to do is post clearly defined, step by step things
to do to get Japanese working with mutt, emacs, and debian. Since I
could not find this information, I have been forced to spend a few hours
learning about these subsytems. Sadly this is becoming a complaint about
linux, there are several technical projects I want to work on, and none of
them involve configuring linux, so there goes my limited time to work on
"real" work. This is where MS and maybe mac have the advantage. Too bad
MS sucks to bad to be tolerable, and Mac does not run (ironically)
windowmaker. Such is life as a virgo, everything has to be perfect.

So here go:

1) Canna defaults to Shift-Space, can this be changed? This default means
   that the way I type, I am switching into canna all the time. 

2) Emacs, the .emacs files language-env provides removes Alt-Meta
   support. I cannot tell where, and I will have to revist those heady
   days of lisp programming in college and do a line by line debug of
   this .emacs file if no one knows what to do. I'm not going to do that
   just yet. I'm going to do drink beer. As one might imagine, loosing
   Alt Meta support in Emacs, pretty much sucks. I may have to report
   this as a bug, if its not just some messup on my part. 


Do any of these problems exist with debian-jp? Maybe the thing to do
(next time) is to start with debian-jp and hope everything
works. Compounding things could be the fact that I am running debian
woody, which is not release, and could have some bugs, like in the
language-env package. 

ありがと ございます！

best regards,
Michael