On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 10:50:13AM +0100, Markus Kuhn wrote: > I'm trying to keep track of the status of UTF-8 use in operating system > distributions. Which operating systems are setting up for their users > by default a UTF-8 environment today?
Hi, Probably not of the highest interest :-) but during the last two weeks we swiched our distribution which is called UHU-Linux to use UTF-8 by default. We do not have an official release yet, our last official one (1.2) uses Latin-2, the next one is to be expected around spring. However, our current UTF-8 development snapshot doesn't really differ from the stable 1.2, only the character set is altered and a few minor changes were made, so it is fairly stabile and usable. We do not intend to support 8-bit system-wide default locales any more, so wherever a change was necessary to support UTF-8 and that change would have been more complicated if it retained 8-bit support in the mean time, we simply didn't care of it and hard-wired UTF-8 to make the system (and our work) much simpler. For example (this has been discussed here not so long ago) our kernel is now simply patched so that all terminals are UTF-8 by default. In addition to the widely available UTF-8 patches from several major distributions, we created some others as well to fix some of the remaining issues. So we have extra patches to the kernel, groff, less, mc, and a whole lot of other utilities. Furthermore, all the manual pages were converted to UTF-8, taking special care of the manpages of iso-8859-* and koi8-r, so they really look cool and they really show what they talk about :-) Our ever changing set of patches is available to anyone from our version control system, at https://svn.uhulinux.hu/packages/dev/ click on the desired package's name and then on "patches". If someone wants to give it a try to see how UTF-8 stuffs work, the ISO image is available here: ftp://ftp.uhulinux.hu/uhu/dev/snapshots-1.2-UTF8/ In this case some important notes: - Only the first CD is required to perform the installation, it contains all the important stuff for a desktop system, including Gnome, KDE, XFce as well as the standard utilities and the most basic development tools. - Languages other than Hungarian and English are unfortunately not supported (locale information is available, but translations are dropped due to disc space shortage, doh!) - >= 96 MB RAM is required by the installer - English installation can be selected in the Grub menu with F9 - The installer starts with some mystical Hungarian text which has no English version availble yet, and it seems that there's no way to continue. This text calls your attention that this is a development version not to be used in production systems. To proceed, either press Ctrl+Shift+E or wait 2 minutes. The next one is the license, just accept it :-) The rest of the installation procedure should not cause any troubles I hope. - On the installed system, edit /etc/env.d/locale to contain LANG=en_US.UTF-8, edit /etc/sysconfig/layout to define the console layout to "us" if you don't like "hu", and /etc/X11/xorg.conf to change the graphical keyboard layout. Several minor aspects of the system, e.g. boot messages will remain Hungarian but most of the system will be easily usable for English speakers. bye, Egmont -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
