I am a Linux user from Shanghai China.I use linux sence 1998, and usually use Gnome.
I like to stady new technology in open source software,and observe at Frugalware last year.
Sometime I want install frugalware linux in my laptop,but when I look for chinese support at website , I can't got anything.
For example, some Chinese fonts, input method or dicts.Frugalware is a so cool distrabution, I believe it will be popular as ubuntu or archlinux. Only need some i18n support, need many chinese users.
So let us perfect frugalware together.
Locale:
Chinese user (PR China/ TaiWan of China / HongKong and Singapore) and Japan / Korea users are all using almost same fontconfig/input method.
At old linux desktop in chinese enveloment,we used locale as "zh_CN.GB2312" or "zh_CN.GBK".The locale in TaiWan is "zh_TW.BIG5". Now, we are all consolidate into UTF-8. But as chinese political pattern, the user from PR.China are all using "zh_CN.UTF-8",and user from TaiWan are using "zh_TW.UTF-8".
Fonts:
Linux can't popular as Windows in Chinese because there are no any excellent Chinese Fonts distribution with Linux.BSD is same. Most excellent fonts in chinese is not free.Many fonts only for their business. Many years ago,we only could use the fonts from Arphic Co.,Ltd from Taiwan.Their Chinese fonts is "AR PL SungtiL GB","AR PL Mingti2L Big5".Chinese fonts's quantity are over 47,000 . The fonts of Arphic only include 3,000 fonts,and they are not excellent.
For resolve it, a man from TaiWan names "FireFly",he write new fonts base on Arphic,the fonts are named "AR PL FireFly Sung".
In 2004-2005 Arne Götje write some new fonts "ttf-Arphic-Uming"and "ttf-Arphic-Ukai"and "CJKunifonts",they include the fonts from Arphic Co.,Ltd and FireFly Sung , their quantity is over 8,000.
In 2004, a team in China initiate to write full chinese fonts,their name is WenQuanYi( http://wenq.org http://wqy.sf.net ).
In 2006.05.20 WenQ group release their WenQ Bitmap fonts v0.7.0-4 ,this release include over 16,000 chinese fonts and will include all 70,000+ CJK characters. ( http://wenq.org/index.cgi?Dou_README )
I recommend use WenQuanYi Bitmap and ttf-arphic-uming for Chinese user(Korea/Japan).This is the first GPL Chinese fonts.
Input method:
As most linux distribution,I holp I could use Frugalware as my main desktop. Except type English characters,we have to type Chinese characters, so we must have a input method on my desktop. FCITX or SCIM are all good choose.I recommend use SCIM(http://www.scim-im.org/projects/imengines)
For start scim or any input method,we had better set global config for X enveloment as fllow:
export [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or fcitx)
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
export QT_IM_MODULE=scim
export [EMAIL PROTECTED]
export XIM_PROGRAM="XIM"
export XIM=scim
I will help frugalware support Chinese , translate the documents into Chinese ,and give tech support for somebody.thx a lot!
--
Best Regards!
Eric Neon @ OSfire Ubuntu-CN
http://www.osfire.com
http://www.ubuntu.org.cn
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