Summary: There are problems with using Chinese (simplified) and Mandrake. Chinput not only doesn't work, it doesn't even seem to exist as an RPM. There are locale problems with the shell. KDE is using the wrong font (probably using traditional character font instead of a simplified character font) - this may or may not be a locale problem. xdm crashes when quitting the KDE window manager. konsole is not installed. the console, when booting, does not display Chinese characters, but only garbage.
Details: I initially installed using English with added Chinese language support. I changed KDE to use Chinese using the "Accessibility|Country - Region and Language" setting. (where else would the average user change this?) There were font problems from the start, using only traditional characters and not simplified characters. There was no Chinput input method. And no Konsole either!! - had to install it by hand. Chinput, by the way, was not working in 9.1 either. It had GB font problems. I was unable to get it to work. I hear it worked fine in 9.0. It needs to be fixed and put back in and installed by default when simplified Chinese language is selected. By the way, quitting KDE does not go back to the graphical login xdm mode (even though I am in runlevel 5). This happens both when auto-logging in and when manually logging in. So it brings me back to console login. I have not been able to narrow down where the problem is. I wanted to try gdm and kdm instead of mdkkdm, but had problems changing and did not have time to test. I decided to install again, but this time entirely in Chinese. I only chose to load in two packages on installation: KDE and GNOME. The installation process worked fine, and I set the default user to go into KDE. On boot, the booting messages, verbose mode (starting services and such), had no Chinese character support, but had Chinese text, so it was all upper ASCII garbage. KDE had no simplified character support, so it had empty boxes for many of characters. Again, no Konsole was installed (I had to install it by hand). This should be installed with KDE. Most of my menus were in English. The bash shell had locale problems. It said "locale: cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory. It said the same for LC_MESSAGES and LC_ALL. When doing a printenv or looking at .i18n, the LC_* variables were most set at zh_CN.UTF-8, with a few set at en_US.UTF-8 LANG, LC_CTYPE, LC_TIME, LC_COLLATE, LC_MESSAGES). XMODIFIERS was set as @im=none. (I think the files of interest here are /etc/profile.d/10lang.sh. The XMODIFIERS is set in /etc/X11/xinit/XIM, and there is something in /etc/sysconfig/i18n as well.) I did startx as root after logging in without the xdm support. This went into gnome, and everything worked fine, except no Chinput support. I must say, however, that my LC_* variables were all zh_CN as root. As my user, they were zh_CN.UTF-8 and a few were en. This is something that should be looked into. We should by default make the user's .i18n LC_* variables something reasonable. I do not know if UTF-8 is reasonable yet. My problems may largely be related to these LC_ variables. drakconf works fine with simplified chinese. I will also add that when I did "export LC_ALL=en" and "export LANG=en" and then did startx as root, Gnome started in Chinese, but the gnome panel consistently had a segmentation fault, died, restarted, and segfaulted again. Go figure. When they were all back at zh_CN again, there were no problems. I ran out of time to do further testing, but I wanted to get this out so others can look at it and think about how to solve some of these issues, and maybe help me understand this better. The bottom lines, however, are as follows: Chinput must be installed and it needs to work, unlike in 9.1 The locale variables need to be set properly by default, especially when doing a Chinese install. The console needs Chinese font support if you are going to display Chinese messages on boot. KDE and Gnome need to work properly with Chinese language support. xdm/mdkkdm needs to run properly after quitting KDE Finally, I STRONGLY suggest making the login screen (xdm, gdm, etc) able to change the language. Redhad does this by default. gdm seems to be able to do it. People need to be able to choose their language before logging in, and not have to negotiate menus in English. Chinese speakers (who have little or no English) have no problems using Redhat - it all works out of the box. For this reason only, I have a hard time recommending Mandrake to them, even though I prefer it. So I want language selection to be simple and painless for the average user. I am unsure exactly where to report all this. I assume this is the right place. I think there is too much and it is too vague to report on bugzilla. If there is somewhere else I should report, perhaps someone could direct me to the right place. I really want to get Chinese working smoothly under Mandrake from the start. Thanks. vic
