Debian and Japanese from a Debian Developer

[Ben Gertzfield <che@example.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John De Hoog <dehoog@example.com> writes:

    John> Earlier when someone else (Simon?) was boostering Debian I
    John> asked how easy it was to set up Japanese support, and got no
    John> answer. Can someone else tell us? I know it's possible, I
    John> just want to know how much trouble it is for a beginner.

I guess it's watashi no deban now :) [Pun intended.]  

Howdy to everyone on the list!  I'm a Debian developer, just moved to
Tokyo two weeks ago, fresh from graduating UC Santa Cruz.  I'm happily
using Japanese and KDE right now on my desktop and laptop at my new job
at gmo.jp, so let me do a little evangelizing.  It's actually very simple
if you run the unstable distribution of Debian; anything less is a little
painful.

    John> Anyone can obtain the Japanese Red Hat 7.1 distribution or a
    John> Vine distribution or Solaris, for that matter, and simply
    John> choose Japanese as the default language at installation. I
    John> have a feeling there is no such easy way out with
    John> Debian. True?

The Debian-JP group have done a TON of work getting mainstream Debian
to work flawlessly with Japanese input and output.  I would recommend
installing Debian 2.2 (potato) with a very minimal set of packages,
edit your /etc/apt/sources.list to point to unstable, and run apt-get
update; apt-get dist-upgrade .  

This will (hopefully, hoping unstable isn't living up to its moniker)
upgrade you to the unstable distribution; once you're at this point,
simply edit /etc/locales.gen and uncomment the ja_JP line and run
locale-gen to regenerate your libc locales.  The packages you probably
want for proper Japanese support, installable through apt-get, are:

language-env (sets up your dot-files etc by running 'set-language-env')
task-japanese (meta-package to install packages handy for Japanese-language
               users)
task-kde
kde-i18n-ja
task-x-window-system

I also copied over the Microsoft (sorry!) truetype msgothic.ttc and
msmincho.ttc font collections, and found a fonts.dir on the web. I
edited it a bit to remove the ugly, unreadable bold versions and put
it up at:

http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/truetype/

You can grab the original fonts.dir files for each of those font
collections there, as well as a Makefile to regenerate the main one.

The rest is pretty much the same as any other distro. When I logged
into KDE for the first time, it asked me my country and language, and
after selecting Japanese and changing all the fonts to msgothic, I got
this lovely desktop:

http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/snapshot1.png

Feel free to email me with any questions.  I love Debian, and I love
helping folks use it! 

I should be at this Saturday's meeting, too.  It'll be great to meet
you all!

Ben

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