tlug: English/Nihongo linux configuration recommendations

[Rex Walters <rex@example.com>]

So Win95-J goes oppai-up on my home machine and I'll be danged if I can
get it working again.  Hours I've tried.  Cannot for the life of me
figure out what combination of drivers I'd been using previously to keep
it relatively stable.  Even went so far as to try a Win98 upgrade
(complete hardware lockup every time ... quite repeatable).  May I have
another one, sir! <swat>

I almost never boot windows any more, but my wife was depending on
Win95-J for everything (else, believe me, I'd have put an ext2
filesystem on that partition so fast it would make your head spin).

My wife needs Japanese email capability, Japanese web browsing ability,
and the ability to create and print nice looking Japanese documents.
She isn't terribly knowledgeable about computers but is quite willing to
learn.

Okay, I sez, I'll put her on Linux, it can do all that in spades!  No
more multibooting.  Hooray!

First I go out and buy and install TL-2.0J.  It seemed relatively okay,
but there were some minor annoyances (mostly I didn't want to re-do all
the zillion customizations I'd done on my previous system).  To make a
long story short, I went back to my original installation (a very hacked
upon RH5.1 installation).

So now I want to make the minimal updates to a stock RH system to make
it useable by a Japanese user (who is also completely fluent in
English).  No advocacy wars please, this may not be the avenue of least
resistance for me, but I'll have fun learning.  (FWIW, I plan to install
Debian 2.0 on another machine for me to play with -- I'm in love with
the Debian policy manual).

I'd like to solicit comments and recommendations from readers.  I'm
spending a lot of time with Craig's web pages, but I think some of the
information is dated and I want to see if there are any other
reccomendations.

These are the apps I plan to give my wife to use:

    Terminal:	kterm (from RH)
    Pager:	less (Japanified version from TL source rpm)
    Editor:	pico (Japanified version from TL source rpm for pine)
    Mailer:	pine from TL or mutt (probably the latter)
    Browser:	muriyari netscape from TL (Ye Gods! Is there nothing better?)
    PS viewer:	gv & ghostscript (again from TL?)
    Typesetter:	TeX (from TL -- is a Japanized Lyx available?)

I believe I also need to install the following infrastructure tools:

    VFlib
    Freetype library (for truetype in magicpoint -- okay this is for me :-)
    Canna
    Jserver
    Kinput2

I'm looking for any recommendations or comments.  I've listed some
preliminary questions below.

1) What do people recommend for displaying Kanji truetype fonts (Ryobi)
   in X?  How does TL do it?

2) Any comments or updates to Craig's recommendations for getting
   Japanese printing working?

3) If I want to let my wife learn the joys of emacs (I don't really want
   to teach her vi) what's the minimum I'll need to install?

4) Any good "basic Linux" web sites in Japanese that I can point my wife
   to?

5) Am I completely insane for attempting this?

Regards,
-- 
Rex
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