Kaixo! > From: Victor Roetman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 21:25:00 +0800 > Subject: [Cooker] Simplified Chinese and 9.2-RC1 problems > 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.
miniChinput package has been updated, the new version works very well, unless in UTF-8 locales. I made changes to DrakX/drakxtools to add the command line parameter to chinput to tell to use gb or big5, which makes it works whatever the locale encoding. The problem of missing rpm packages in RC1 concerns various other packages as well, and it will be handled; it isn't a Chinese specific problem however. > 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?) You should do it trough localedrake; however... I see it doesn't appear in mandrake control center! I don't think KDE control center defines the needed things for the XIM methods. Maybe KDE should be patched so it calls localedrake in batch mode with the right values ? (localedrake defines language variables, but also input method and KDE default fonts; KDE language panel only defines language) > Chinput, by the way, was not working in 9.1 either. It had GB font problems. fixed > 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. it is installed by default when support for simplified Chinese is selected (but the rpm itself was missing in RC1,yes, a bug). it is however enabled by default only if you choose simplified Chinese language as main language, either during install or trough localedrake. > 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. xdm (contrary to mode modern *dm) doesn't monitor itself to catch problems and reload. I don't know much about xdm; but it should have written some important logs into a log file before crashing; someone should tell where the file should be found. > 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. Mmh, chinese on console should be desactivated... I'll look at the initscripts. > KDE had no simplified character support, so it had empty boxes for many of > characters. That is strange; wasn't fonts-ttf-gb2312 package installed? > Most of my menus were in English. You mean the desktop menu? I have yet to package a new mdk-menu-messages; zh_CN is however now 100% translated. > 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. Ouch, did "locales-zh" was installed ? > 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). The above setup is what you would have for choosing English as language, and China as country. With the current localedrake it is normal that in such a setup you don't have proper Chinese language support; you should instead choose Chinese language, and, if you don't want Chinese translations, edit i18n file and change: LANGUAGE=C export KDE_LANG=C (and leave all the others as is) > 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. The default values for locales variables is set in /etc/sysconfig/i18n but a user can override them with a $HOME/.i18n file > 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. UTF-8 is used when languages are chosen that cannot use a same old encoding. (or when requested at install time). > My problems may > largely be related to these LC_ variables. Yes, but not to the use of UTF-8; your problem is that you choose English language while you wanted to write in Chinese. Maybe 9.2 will have a special case when country is one of those where Chinese is used, and in such case enable Chinese langugage support and input; it is being discussed. > drakconf works fine with simplified chinese. gtk2 programs are able of finding missing glyphs from other fonts if needed; so you never have the "square box" problem (unless you don't have any single font at all with those characters of course), so we don't need to care about defining default fonts for those > 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, LANGUAGE variable has priority over all others for the translations (that is true for all programs but KDE ones, which utilise KDE_LANG instead, and the kde config files; but in any case defining LC_ALL or LANG doesn't change the language used for interface in most modern programs; it changes however things as charset encoding, default font used, sorting order, date, number representation, monetary unit, etc.) > 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. That shouldn't happen... do you have "en" locale installed? what returns "LC_ALL=en locale charmap" ? > 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. Thanks. > Finally, I STRONGLY suggest making the login screen (xdm, gdm, etc) able to > change the language. That feature is dependent of the *dm; some provide it, some do not. Note however that changing the language is not enough for languages that need specific input methods. > 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. It should be the same for 9.2, once the bugs get solved. Thanks -- Ki �a vos v�ye b�n, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Italian or Portuguese]
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