Re: [tlug] Suse blues

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "paul" == paul arenson <paul@example.com> writes:

    paul> Japanese was not working under this mode, but anyway, I put
    paul> myself back in Japanese mode via the desktop menus, did the
    paul> instatlation of any additional software packages, and then
    paul> rebooted.

    paul> Result, in Japanese menu system, was the same as before.

    paul> Getting Kana entry in some programs....Space bar did not
    paul> call up the Kanji server, though I have seen at startup that
    paul> it is running.

This is very high-level brain-damage called the "POSIX locale".  The
problem is that it is _not_ designed for multilingual usage of the
kind you want, and I don't know of any distribution that caters to
multilingual use.

Transparently getting the menu system in English with the Japanese
services available is likely to be a little tricky.  What you can do
for now is start all your applications that require Japanese input
from the command line, and put the line

export LANG=ja_JP.eucJP

in `~/.bashrc'.  (Yes, that's a valid filename in Unix.  The quotes
are not part of it.)  This will mean your apps have Japanese menus (if
they support them).  You may be able to get English menus back by
adding

export LC_MESSAGES=en_US.iso8859-15

To get this to work globally, you would need to put the LANG and the
LC_MESSAGES initializations in "the right place" but this is
distro-specific.

    paul> I am unsure if switching langugaes--like when I installed in
    paul> Japanese, and then,switch to English menu system and then
    paul> back, means we are somehow ditching some software that needs
    paul> to be reinstalled.  I suspect no.

You suspect correctly.

    paul> Then later i can work on doing same with English menus.
    paul> Seems that SHOULD be out of the box, but who knows.

Actually, it's quite hard.  You wouldn't believe how badly early betas
of Windows 2000 screwed up this kind of thing.  It took the Mule
(Emacs) people 10 years to get it nearly right.  It's hardly a
profitable thing to do, the proportion of people who are multilingual
in their daily work is vanishingly small; it only matters to the
bottom line if you ship 100s of millions of copies.

    paul> Oh, one thing.....when we choose Japanese, there is a menu
    paul> that asks if we want Unicode or not.  Then there are two
    paul> other things--that require yes/No answers, but whcih I do
    paul> not understand.  I have seen references saying it is good to
    paul> use Unicode, but checking it reveals no difference so far.

The differences are in corner cases, and when you try to use
non-Japanese languages as well as Japanese and English, you will find
it much easier to do if you're based on Unicode.

    paul> Still, am tempted to try a "made-in-Japan"

I gather you've found that SuSE does work when you do the whole
installation in Japanese, no?  Do you really think that the most
xenophobic industrialized society is likely to produce multilingual
installations if the most internationalized society in history
doesn't?  Japanese software is notorious for screwing up the ability
to use any language but Japanese correctly-