Hawaii Linux Institute wrote:
Hi MonMotha-
Unless you are willing to become an expert in emacs/mule, your best bet
at the present time is to go with Fedora.
Sorry this violates your "No distro specific" mandate. But, again at
the present time, the implementation of "alternate input methods" in
Fedora (and in RHEL) is so superior to all other distros, I just don't
see any way not to discuss it.
Since FC2, Red Hat has decided to use iiimf as the (universal) default
input method for CJK. It was a disaster when first came out and many
users immediately switched to the old method (e.g., kinput2 for
Japanese, xcin for traditional Chinese, Chinput for simplified Chinese,
nabi for Korean, etc.) after installation.
However, with FC3-Test 3, iiimf seems to be in an amazingly good shape.
Fecora Core 3 also provides an im-switching tool for users to move
between iiim and any of the old im protocols.
At the present time, iiimf is being developed mainly by corporate
developers (Red Hat, IBM, Sun, Novell, and a couple of smaller companies
in Hong Kong and Japan), and there is very little documentation. I am
sure this will improve when iiimf gets into a better shape.
Red Hat has made iiimf a GTK2 module. To invoke it, all you need to do
is to specify the locale and run the module (and use control-space key
combo to switch b/t your default language and the new language). To
input Japanese characters, you will first type in Romanji (Roman
characters) using your English keyboard. Your screen will show the
corresponding Katakana. Then you can use the down cursor key to flip
into Hirigana, Kanji, and back to Katakana. wayne
The issue isn't how a specific distro packages it. Fedora may do a very
nice job of that, and I'm sure it has a nice pretty frontend to set it up.
What I'm interested in knowing is what actually needs to be done to set
this up. I don't care if I have to recompile my X and GTK pacakges to
make it work; I'm fully capable of doing so.
The question is not a request for a step by step toutorial. What I want
to know is what actually needs to be done. I'm willing to read install
instructions to make things happen. I manage my config files by hand for
a reason. If I need to change something, there's no frontend to mess up
by doing so.
Oh, and Debian appears to have iiimf available as a GTK module as well.
In a way, you did answer the question (albeit with a bunch of useless
information as I *will not* run Redhat or anything derrived directly from
it, I learned my lesson with RedHat 6.2 and 9).
--MonMotha
