tlug: Mutt and Getting linux to work with japanese

[John Seebach <jseebach@example.com>]

Someone wrote:
> Anyone running Debian and not wanting to compile this themselves can also
> get Debian binary packages of Mutt and Slang at the above URLs.

Or, if you're running debian, simply type in the following command:

apt-get install mutt-ja

For a mutt package built with japanese support. I believe it's part of
the distribution now. It works great for me. I still find myself
grinning every time I use apt. It's that cool. The only problem was
finding a basic japanese editor. I ended up compiling and installing
pico from pine-jp, which was a huge headache but works. 

Incidentally, I don't think that I ever thanked Chris S. for all of
his help when doing this -- I got pine working and then headed off for
a vacation. Chris, if you're listening, thanks. That last patched
version of pine-jp that you put up on the tlug ftp site compiled
without a hitch.

James Calver was asking about getting redhat to work with japanese,
and asked if people had any other distribution suggestions. I'm also
fairly new to linux, and started out with the CD's to two
distributions: Mandrake 5.3 and Debian 2.1.

I liked mandrake, the distribution I tried first. It's redhat 5.2 with
a very intelligent KDE setup grafted onto the top of it if you go for
that kind of thing. It was easy to use. Good for the first-timer who
just wanted to experiment with linux on his desktop machine. I was
quite satisfied with it until I wanted to get it working with
japanese. At which point, i found myself where you are now.

Debian, well, let's just say that it was humbling at first. I had a
decent amount of UNIX experience, and I probably had to install Debian
at least 5 times before I got it right. But getting japanese to work
was much easier. Several TLUG members had recommended Debian, and so
when I had my japanese woes, I decided to try it. Pretty much
everything you'd need to get japanese working is available as a binary
package, usually as part of the regular debian distribution. The
learning curve was definitely steeper than with Redhat/Mandrake, but
you couldn't force me to go back. I think the thing that impressed me
the most was the thoughtfulness that went into this distribution. I
don't have much experience with linux, so I can't compare it to other
distributions with much authority, but I found that the administrative
tasks that I was used to doing with SCO were much easier with Debian
than they were with Mandrake. MUCH easier. I won't even talk about
what disk druid did to my partition tables.

and then there's apt for packaging, which is just about the coolest
thing I've seen.

So, my point: If you haven't tried Debian, I'd suggest giving it a
try. Getting Japanese to work is fairly painless, and other things
just seem to make a lot of sense. True, some of the software in 2.1 is
a little out of date, but it works great, and if you're the sort that
needs the latest and greatest, you can always upgrade to the unstable
branch (potato). I've found that it works quite well, too.

I'd be happy to help you out (or at least try to -- I'm new to this,
too) when you get stuck if you need it.

Good luck either way!

john
jseebach@example.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Nomikai: September 17 (Fri), 19:30 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
Next Technical Meeting: October 9 (Sat), 13:00     place: Temple Univ.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan