Re: [tlug] Re: typing in Japanese (Red Hat 7.2)

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 12:15:03AM +0900, Graeme Jensen wrote:

> Sorry if this seems like a silly question but I have one user login name that 
> is setup to use Japanese as the default login language but I can't seem to 
> type Japanese.  This is despite having the right keyboard jp106 and the 
> matching keyboard map setup.  I've checked out a few site about this but 
> found too much detailed explanation that I couldn't really understand.  

Well, it *should* be a silly question. But unfortunately, setting up the
Japanese input mechanisms on a non-localized Linux system is still far
from routine. I guess there just aren't enough of us doing it.

> I'd like to set up my box to have the Japanese User type Japanese by default 
> and other users to be able to type Japanese when so needed.

One thing you should try to do if you can is to set the locale to
Japanese. What distribution are you running? Until rather recently,
Japanese locale support was quite broken on Linux. My distribution,
Debian, is finally starting to have a usable Japanese locale--meaning
that many apps are properly internationalized, and will show up with
Japanese menus, etc., just by virtue of running in an environment where
the locale is set to Japanese. I expect RedHat and other distributions
have made varying degrees of progress with their locale support.

Given that you want the ability to log in in Japanese, I'd suggest
setting your default system locale to Japanese--then for the
non-Japanese users, reset the locale to something else (e.g.
'en_US.ISO-8859-1') for each login session. I'm not sure it's absolutely
necessary, but it might help you avoid some problems--and a Japanese 
locale doesn't usually *prevent* you from doing anything in English.

As for the specifics of how to do that ... how you set the default
locale is distribution dependent, and I only know how to do it for
Debian. Setting the locale for a KDE session is ... well, maybe the KDE
gurus can help with that.

> Most kde desktop items do display Japanese quite well.  Some dialogue boxes 
> display "mojibake", I believe it's called (question marks as opposed to 
> kanji)  

There could be several reasons for that. Could be their developers
didn't want to bother with i18n (but probably not if they're KDE), or
perhaps they're trying to display the wrong fonts. Hard to say without a
lot more specifics.

> locate kterm

Whether or not you have kterm doesn't make any difference to GUI
applications or to your login problem.

>  locate kinput2
  ....
> /usr/X11R6/bin/kinput2.canna-wnn6

Okay, you've got kinput2. But is it *running*? I suspect not. If you
just wanted to run Japanese applications, you could start it from the
command line at any time with:

  $ kinput2.canna-wnn6 &

but since you want to be able to log in in Japanese, you need to do
something in your KDE configuration. If I remember right how KDE works,
your sessions are managed by KDM (KDE Display Manager). So you need to
find out how to customize your KDM configuration--maybe somebody else on
the list can help. And I would say that when X starts up, the very first
thing is to set LANG=ja_JP.EUC-JP (or some variation of that), and then
to start kinput2. There might be some additional steps on top of that,
but I think that will get you a large part of the way to where you're
going.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@example.com
http://www.havenrock.com/