Re: Japanese locale and Fascists [was: tlug: Meeting August 2]

[Steve Dunham <dunham@example.com>]

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tlug note from Steve Dunham <dunham@example.com>
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Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> It was determined that FreeDOS (a DOS emulation distributed with
> DOSemu) is not ready for prime time (so why is it included in the
> Debian distribution?), and that DOSemu is still not ready to handle
> some big DOS extended apps (an economic simulation package called
> GAMS, in particular).  W95 multiboot continues (although even there
> you have to reboot into MS-DOS for the PharLap version of GAMS, the
> Watcom version will run in a full-screen DOS window but not in a
> window---why not?  it's a text program!  Jeez, what a crock.)

FreeDOS is included in Debian because they wanted a free version of
DOS to run on dosemu.  Really, it was a matter of shipping with nothing
or FreeDOS: either way you can add MS-DOS if you have it, and if they
ship FreeDOS, you have something you can use if you don't have DOS.

> By the way, my patch for XEmacs + XIM will be in XEmacs 20.3-b16;
> localization is still far from satisfactory in XEmacs, but I'm
> preparing to switch to XEmacs from GNU, as the font handling is
> infinitely better, and it's nice to have X-Face etc.  And Martin
> Buchholz seems pretty sure that this patch will handle the Xlib
> crashes.  Evidently Sun Motif i18n has gotten a lot more stable than
> before 20.1 when Motif was broken and Xlib sometimes worked, so Motif
> is now the preferred widget library for the XIM implementation as far
> as Martin is concerned.  But he "has no access to kinput2 or non-Sun
> implementations of Xlib...".  No progress has been made on
> incorporating any of Canna, Wnn, or XIM into LEIM :-(

The font handling in GNU Emacs is very poor.  XEmacs support of mixing 
font sizes makes a big difference visually.  (XEmacs apparently supports
it better than Netscape too...)


> Craig Oda wrote:
> 
>     >> Interesting.  I'm using Solaris and HP-UX as well.  I use CDE
>     >> on both of them.  I know almost nothing about CDE though.
>     >> There is a usenet group, comp.unix.cde (I think).  I posted
>     >> once when I tried to get dtterm on Solaris to display kanji.  I
>     >> don't have the Japanese version of Solaris.  I eventually gave
>     >> up and installed kterm from source.

> >>>>> "Steve" == Steve Dunham <dunham@example.com> replied:

>     Steve> Yeah, they're a bunch of fascists... Apparently, Sun
>     Steve> doesn't ship the japanese locale with normal Solaris
>     Steve> (although they apparently ship chinese, korean, etc.)

The strong reaction here is mainly because I'm pissed that Sun is 
advertising "better internationalization" in Solaris 2.6 and it isn't
there.  A friend at work, who is also studying Japanese, is thinking
about installing Linux instead of Solaris because of this. 
 
> If you know better, I'll bow to your greater knowledge, but my
> suspicion is that probably Fujitsu owns the Japanese locale
> technology, whereas Sun probably built the others more or less from
> scratch, or paid some Chinese and Korean geniuses about 1% of the
> market value for all rights to their ideas.  Ie, it's not Sun that is
> fascistic, it's the Japanese firm.  But we already knew that....

Ahh, this clears up a few things.  We did ask a Sun representative about
it, and he mumbled something about "Sun Japan" wanting a seperate 
distribution, but I didn't know that seperate entities were involved.

I don't really need their input method or Wnn6, I just want enough to 
able to set the locale to "ja", so that X will turn wide characters on.


Steve
dunham@example.com
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