Good CJK distro

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

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

    Jake> Can anyone recommend a Linux distribution that handles
    Jake> Chinese, Japanese and Korean well?

If you're serious about all three ....

None that are better than any others AFAIK.  Turbolinux does a lot of
Asian localization, but multilingual is hard, and TL has been known to
intentionally break I18N to get a slightly slicker Japanese locale.

My recommendation is to forget about your Linux distribution and learn
to live inside Emacs/Mule for the next year or two.  By then KDE and
GNOME will probably both be pretty well internationalized, and it
won't matter which distro you use.

    Jake> Is Debian any better?

Yes and no.  Debian mainstream is better in the sense that they don't
patch things to achieve better localization.  So if you can do some
hacking of your own, you're less likely to find that the distro has
already closed off all retreat into sanity.

Unfortunately, there still is no sanity in Japanese; to get a
glibc-compatible Japanese locale, you need glibc 2.2, which is only
available in the unstable distro.  I don't recommend Debian unstable
right now if you have work to get done; they just upped glibc to 2.2 a
few weeks ago and X11 to XFree86 4.0.1 a few days ago, and nothing
works quite right.  I'm rebooting several times a day just to clear
the kernel's earwax out, so to speak.  (I am running a 2.4 kernel,
which probably makes life much less simple.  Still, I wasn't having
problems with anything except my SCSI scanner until the last updates
of glibc and XF86

You may be able to use some stuff out of the debian-jp distro to get
Japanese to work, that stuff is not part of the Debian mainstream for
a reason.  Namely, it will almost certainly hose your Chinese and
Korean.

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