Chinese support is coming along very nicely. I think we are almost there. There are a few things that still don't work right, however. This message is a little long, and somewhat detailed but will hopefully explain exactly what the problems are, and what I did to test them.
When installing in Simplified Chinese, with no other languages, the locale was zh_CN, and everything seems to work as expected. The problems happen when using more than one language. My test install was from the 2003 Sept 19 cooker. The installation laguage was Simplified Chinese. Additional language support was chosen for: Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, American English. I did NOT choose "Use Unicode by default" However, /etc/sysconfig/i18n uses zh_CN.UTF-8 for everything except LANGUAGE=zh_CN.GB2312:zh_CN:zh (I mentioned this in bug #5581) This is the default locale when no ~/.i18n is present in the user's directory. All tests were using KDE with auto-login. Restarts of KDE/X typically were done with ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X, and X/KDE was automatically restarted. Konsole's default font for all these locales (except Japanese) looks terrible, by the way. It's way too big. It's the same size no matter what size you choose. To change it you must choose a custom font. It has always been this way with Chinese locales, by the way. No .i18n: Initially, chinput would not input characters into Konsole, kwrite, or kedit, (Qt apps), but worked with gvim, OpenOffice, gedit. kedit gives the following error when typing with Chinput: kdecore (KAccel): WARNING: g_bKillAccelOverride set, but received an event other than AccelOverride. zh_CN.UTF-8: If I ran localedrake, setting my locale to simplified Chinese, it creates the .i18n file with zh_CN.UTF-8. Then, restarting kde, things seemed to work fine. However, if I deleted both ~/.i18n AND ~/.qt/ then it gave the same problem again. My uneducated guess is that whatever creates the ~/.qt/ files is looking at ~/.i18n and not at the environment variables (or /etc/sysconfig/i18n). Openoffice used japanese language localization!! (I mentioned this in bug #5583) zh_TW.UTF-8: After using localedrake to change my locale to zh_TW.UTF-8, the Mandrake Linux initial popup was missing characters. It is probably using a simplified Chinese font. kwrite would not display traditional characters (it displayed empty boxes), but will display simplified characters. It is probably using a simplified font. kedit, gedit, konsole all worked. Openoffice still used japanese language localization. Chinput was the IME. ko_KR.UTF-8: After using localdrake to change language to Korean (ko_KR.UTF-8), the initial Mandrake popup screen was still in chinese with missing characters. I am assuming now that it is the same as when I started - simplified Chinese and doesn't change with the locale. kwrite would not take korean input. kedit worked, but gave this error when pressing the spacebar using the Ami input method: kdecore (KAccel): WARNING: g_bKillAccelOverride set, but received an event other than AccelOverride. Konsole and gedit seem to work fine. Openoffice localized properly to Korean, but gave the following errors when running oowriter: /usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory /usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory /usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory ja_JP.UTF-8: After using localedrake to change the language to Japanese, the welcome popup still had the same problem. kwrite would not display the proper fonts when entering japanese with kinput2. It displays boxes for japanese characters. The menus localized fine. kedit, gedit, konsole seemed to work fine. Openoffice localized fine. By the way, strange things happen when you choose japanese language, but korea for a country. I think that kind of problem can be left until later. In all these cases localedrake language selection choices were in English. zh_CN: Now I checked things out again with simplified chinese, but this time removed the .UTF-8 encoding from each line in my ~/.i18n file, and deleted the ENC=utf8 line. Now it is only zh_CN Upon KDE restart, oowriter localized to Japanese! So I deleted ~/.openoffice ~/.kde and ~/.qt. But upon another KDE restart, I again could not use Chinput with qt apps. gedit worked fine. Openoffice localized fine. Running localedrake again, choosing simplified chinese, added the line ENC=gb to ~/.i18n Upon KDE restart everything worked fine. So I guess this ENC=?? line in ~/.i18n is pretty important for qt zh_TW: Using localedrake to change the locale to traditional chinese/taiwan gives ~/.i18n locale to be zh_TW. I deleted ~/.openoffice to be safe. Upon KDE restart kwrite still would not display traditional characters. kedit, gedit, openoffice all worked fine. xcin was the IME. So I deleted ~/.kde, ~/.qt, and ~/.openoffice and restarted KDE. This time all the KDE menus were missing characters (must be using a simplified font). kedit, kwrite would not display traditional characters. gedit, as always, worked fine - menus, IME's, etc. In changing to Simplified, restarting KDE, and then back to Traditional, I get the same behavior as the previous paragraph. Incidentally, using gbrxvt with zh_CN.UTF-8 does not work well. I hope this report can be useful. I do not know enough about it all yet to know exactly which information is relevant, and which is superfluous. I am not sure how to report all this into bugzilla, since it's rather broad, so I am posting it here. I hope these issues can be resolved before the release. Chinese (and other language) support has come a long ways, and it is beginning to look really good. It's very nice to be able to switch between languages on the same machine. (Perhaps in six months or a year Mandrake can move completely to Unicode and change IME's on the fly.) vic
