Re: OS Humor

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Shigeru" == Shigeru IKEDA <si@example.com> writes:

    Shigeru>  ------ On 4/30/96 at 3:41:24 AM Kise wrote: ------

    Shigeru> PS Question 1: Does Linux support the Diamond Speedstar
    Shigeru> series? 

Probably not, although you can look.  It will be supported as plain
VGA and maybe VESA, but Diamond is famous for being secretive about
interfaces.  No no-release agreement, no info.  That's a flat conflict
with GPL, so....

    Shigeru>  Question 2: Could anyone recommend Linux books
    Shigeru> describing how to display Japanese under Linux? The one
    Shigeru> I'm using, "Using Linux," from Que doen't have any
    Shigeru> information on the subject.

There is an OReilly book by Ken Lund, "Japanese Information
Processing."  Excellent, of course.  The Mule docs for Egg/Canna/Wnn
give you more than you might ever want to know about the practice of
I18N (internationalization).  If you can read Japanese....  :-)
      01234567890123456789
       |---18 keta :)---|

    Shigeru> I don't know the books you want, I think Japanese-HOWTO
    Shigeru> or so exists.  Easy way to display Japanese is installing
    Shigeru> X11. You can display and edit = Japanese text with Xedit,
    Shigeru> which is in the standard X11 distribution.

I usually run Mule+Canna+X Windows, too, which is about as good as it
gets.  But you may not have the resources to devote to that.

I think you need some kind of Japanese input method, too.  X provides
Wnn and probably Canna.  Canna and Wnn are archived at ftp.iij.ad.jp
in /pub/linux/X/source/im (or something like that).  Presumably there
are lots of others.  But configuration and installation is not
necessarily simple.

Alternative is JE (Japanese extensions).  Available everywhere now.
Easy to install, except don't believe what you read in the English
installation guide if it's older than 97.6.  I don't know about the
recent ones, nor the Japanese version.  EZInst should have been named
"sugu-kurashu" in 97.4 JE; since then I've just un-tar-gzip'ped them
by hand, ase-mo-denai.  Probably EZInst works better now, but I can't
give any advice :-)  OTOH, amybe you shouldn't listen to me anyway, I
build most things except GCC and XFree86 from scratch when installing.

Shopping list for JE:
    * kon - displays Japanese
    * Wnn or Canna - kana-kanji henkan
    * mule or jvim - Japanese editing; Mule is GNU Emacs 19.28+=alpha,
                     jvim is vi clone (I think)

Known go-chuu-i and problems:
    * Mule is bleeding enormous.  Registered with the government as
      a religion; only a fanatic would use that much space for an editor.
    * Wnn and Canna usually are setup as servers on a TCP port.
      Requires editing /etc/services.
    * Many versions of kon require that the font installer programs be
      chmod'ed suid: "chmod u+s /usr/bin/fld.*"

After that, you're on your own.

For input methods, Wnn is probably most popular.  I don't know why I
started using Canna; it's good too.  Wnn provides more i18n, with
Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean well-supported.

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Socio-Economic Planning       http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com