Kaixo!
> From: Victor Roetman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 21:25:00 +0800
> Subject: [Cooker] Simplified Chinese and 9.2-RC1 problems
> Summary:
> There are problems with using Chinese (simplified) and Mandrake. Chinput not
> only doesn't work, it doesn't even seem to exist as an RPM.
miniChinput package has been updated, the new version works very well,
unless in UTF-8 locales. I made changes to DrakX/drakxtools to add the
command line parameter to chinput to tell to use gb or big5, which makes
it works whatever the locale encoding.
The problem of missing rpm packages in RC1 concerns various other packages
as well, and it will be handled; it isn't a Chinese specific problem however.
> Details:
> I initially installed using English with added Chinese language support. I
> changed KDE to use Chinese using the "Accessibility|Country - Region and
> Language" setting. (where else would the average user change this?)
You should do it trough localedrake; however... I see it doesn't appear
in mandrake control center!
I don't think KDE control center defines the needed things for the XIM
methods.
Maybe KDE should be patched so it calls localedrake in batch mode with
the right values ?
(localedrake defines language variables, but also input method and KDE
default fonts; KDE language panel only defines language)
> Chinput, by the way, was not working in 9.1 either. It had GB font problems.
fixed
> I was unable to get it to work. I hear it worked fine in 9.0. It needs to
> be fixed and put back in and installed by default when simplified Chinese
> language is selected.
it is installed by default when support for simplified Chinese is selected
(but the rpm itself was missing in RC1,yes, a bug).
it is however enabled by default only if you choose simplified Chinese
language as main language, either during install or trough localedrake.
> By the way, quitting KDE does not go back to the graphical login xdm mode
> (even though I am in runlevel 5). This happens both when auto-logging in and
> when manually logging in.
xdm (contrary to mode modern *dm) doesn't monitor itself to catch problems
and reload. I don't know much about xdm; but it should have written
some important logs into a log file before crashing; someone should
tell where the file should be found.
> I decided to install again, but this time entirely in Chinese. I only chose
> to load in two packages on installation: KDE and GNOME. The installation
> process worked fine, and I set the default user to go into KDE.
>
> On boot, the booting messages, verbose mode (starting services and such), had
> no Chinese character support, but had Chinese text, so it was all upper ASCII
> garbage.
Mmh, chinese on console should be desactivated... I'll look at the initscripts.
> KDE had no simplified character support, so it had empty boxes for many of
> characters.
That is strange; wasn't fonts-ttf-gb2312 package installed?
> Most of my menus were in English.
You mean the desktop menu?
I have yet to package a new mdk-menu-messages; zh_CN is however now
100% translated.
> The bash shell had locale problems. It said "locale: cannot set LC_CTYPE to
> default locale: No such file or directory. It said the same for LC_MESSAGES
> and LC_ALL.
Ouch, did "locales-zh" was installed ?
> When doing a printenv or looking at .i18n, the LC_* variables were most set at
> zh_CN.UTF-8, with a few set at en_US.UTF-8 LANG, LC_CTYPE, LC_TIME,
> LC_COLLATE, LC_MESSAGES).
The above setup is what you would have for choosing English as language,
and China as country.
With the current localedrake it is normal that in such a setup you don't
have proper Chinese language support; you should instead choose Chinese
language, and, if you don't want Chinese translations, edit i18n file
and change:
LANGUAGE=C
export KDE_LANG=C
(and leave all the others as is)
> I did startx as root after logging in without the xdm support. This went into
> gnome, and everything worked fine, except no Chinput support. I must say,
> however, that my LC_* variables were all zh_CN as root. As my user, they
> were zh_CN.UTF-8 and a few were en.
The default values for locales variables is set in /etc/sysconfig/i18n
but a user can override them with a $HOME/.i18n file
> This is something that should be looked
> into. We should by default make the user's .i18n LC_* variables something
> reasonable. I do not know if UTF-8 is reasonable yet.
UTF-8 is used when languages are chosen that cannot use a same old encoding.
(or when requested at install time).
> My problems may
> largely be related to these LC_ variables.
Yes, but not to the use of UTF-8; your problem is that you choose English
language while you wanted to write in Chinese.
Maybe 9.2 will have a special case when country is one of those where
Chinese is used, and in such case enable Chinese langugage support
and input; it is being discussed.
> drakconf work
