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Reading/Writing Chinese Using Linux? 260

Posted by Cliff from the but-my-mandarin-is-a-bit-rusty dept.
Rimbo asks: "I'm building a computer for a friend, who has three major requirements from his system: He wants an Athlon with a 333MHz FSB, he wants absolutely no Microsoft software anywhere near it, and he needs the ability to read and edit Chinese. I imagine Red Flag Linux has great Chinese support, but is it as easy to use as a desktop OS as Mandrake or Red Hat? How easy is Chinese text editing and entry under the major distributions? What "office" software for Linux is good for editing Chinese? Thanks!"
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Reading/Writing Chinese Using Linux? More

Reading/Writing Chinese Using Linux?

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  • Use the web (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrHat ( 102062 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @05:28PM (#3834252)
    Google is your friend.

    http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Chinese-HOWTO.htm l [ibiblio.org]

    • Re:Use the web (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Google is your friend.
      >
      > http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Chinese-HOWTO.htm l [ibiblio.org]

      This HOWTO is actually quite outdated.

      To answer some of the questions...

      RedHat supports chinese since 7.2. (in 7.1 and earlier it doesn't have chinese truetype fonts, input method editor. I think 7.1 has some bitmap fonts for simplified chinese characters, but no traditional characters font) I haven't try a fresh installed 7.2/7.3, though, so couldn't tell how easy it is.

      And, OpenOffice handles chinese just fine.

    • just use unicode (Score:3, Informative)

      by johnjones ( 14274 )
      yes google is your friend
      but please people just use unicode for everything

      you just have to have an editor that will do unicode and have your fonts set up right (since their is no free unicode set that would be hard) I use xemacs so what do I know

      regards

      john jones

      What is Unicode? [slashdot.org]

      • Re:just use unicode (Score:2, Informative)

        by Daimaou ( 97573 )
        The problem is that most Asian language speaking people hate Unicode and run away from it. The biggest complaints are that some of the characters change when converting from Unicode and Codepage and that the Kanji characters are not in "alphabetical" order in the code page listings (since they share characters across Chinese Traditional and Simplified, Japanese and Korean instead of each language having its own section).

  • Abiword (Score:4, Informative)

    by damiam ( 409504 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @05:29PM (#3834256)
    Abiword has good i18n support, and I'm almost positive I've seen a screenshot of Abiword in Chinese. I'd also imagine that GNOME 2 would support Chinese pretty well if properly configured, thanks to all the new Pango/Unicode stuff..
  • DDR333 only runs at 166.6MHz not 333MHz that's what where the first D in DDR comes in - Double Data Rate, as in 2 bits for each cycle instead of one like the old SDR (I bet you can figure out what that acronym stands for all by yourself).

    • Re:Not 333MHz (Score:3, Informative)

      by photon317 ( 208409 )

      Actually, in an A7V333 with a Palomino Athlon-XP, the FSB is still 133 Mhz. The ram runs at 166Mhz DDR, hence the 333 moniker, but the ram and the processor's FSB are asynchronous with each other.
  • Try Red Flag Linux [redflag-linux.com]. It's a Chinese distro, so your friend will be able to read, write, etc in Chinese.

  • Not as easy as Mandrake or RH (Score:5, Funny)

    by egg troll ( 515396 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @05:34PM (#3834277) Homepage Journal
    I imagine Red Flag Linux has great Chinese support, but is it as easy to use as a desktop OS as Mandrake or Red Hat?

    No, I found it much more difficult to use. Everything is in Chinese!!

  • Chinese Patch for Redhat (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Saturday July 06, 2002 @05:38PM (#3834295)

    Check out .

    /releases/4175.html">

    Yangchunbaixue KDE Chinese Environment or YKCE is a hybridly licensed software that turns Red Hat Linux 7.1 into a sophisticated Chinese KDE desktop environment.

  • Sounds like someone got an OCR'd copy of Harry Potter's latest adventures.

  • I have a client who is Japanese.. (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by SlashChick ( 544252 ) <erica@noSpam.erica.biz> on Saturday July 06, 2002 @05:41PM (#3834308) Homepage Journal
    ...and since I've had to write and test all of my PHP applications with the Japanese charset for him and his friends, I thought I would share my and his experiences.

    I've done both Japanese and Chinese input editing with Windows and MacOS 9, and my client uses Japanese input the majority of the time he uses a PC. He and his friends flatly refuse to use anything but Windows 2000 for hardcore input. The reason? Microsoft's Japanese IME. [microsoft.com] Mac OS 9's input support doesn't compare to this tiny bar that sits at the corner of your screen and lets you flip back and forth between English and several other character sets. According to my client, both mouse support (i.e. clicking the little bar and bringing up the language) and keyboard support (using key commands to change languages) are VASTLY more efficient in Windows 2000 than in MacOS 9. In fact, he's planning to drop his (older) Macs for Windows 2000 and XP machines solely based on this feature.

    Now, I'm not saying that there isn't something similar for Linux. But if Apple couldn't come up with anything more productive for MacOS 9, which was intended from the start to be a consumer-level, desktop, OS, I am highly doubtful that Linux developers can come up with anything better. As is, my client and all of his friends are on either 2000 or XP and are quite happy with their decision.

    As it stands, I believe your friend's decision to not use Microsoft products may be a bit short-sighted, especially considering that this is one of my client's only reasons to switch to Windows from MacOS.
    • A guy at work was reading some sites in Chinese in IE5, I showed him Opera for the Unicode support. I was surprised at how different the pages looked, and all text was correctly displayed.

      The good news, he hooked up me up with some chinese mp3 websites. :)
    • is not looking to the future and where Microsoft is headed with its product cost.

      When I buy a piece of electronic equipment I do not expect to have to keep paying for the privilege of using it.

      Microsoft WILL come up with an enforced subscription system for their OS's, and schemes like Palladium may just end up forcing that on everyone, after all if you are a "standard" windows user (like my parents and hell I wouldn't want to force them offline by making my dad have to learn Linux) palladium looks like a good thing, secure and "hey its built into what I use anyway".

      So the answer is for people to TRY the alternatives - sure they may not be so pretty, or have all the functions, but then thats why Open Source works - if something is "missing" contact the developers and they will probably implement it if its something they missed, sure it might not be available immediately but you will have contributed.

      Palladium will kill that kind of interaction, and make software (and some hardware) the sole juristiction of Microsoft.

      This is not an anti-Microsoft rant, but it s one about freedom, something that those in the US celebrated 2 days ago, and those in China wish they had more of.

      Well nuff said.
      • "if something is "missing" contact the developers and they will probably implement it if its something they missed"

        More like they will send you an email either telling you to code it yourself, supply a patch, or tell you to go screw. 90% of the responses I get are the 1st two, the other 10% are the last one. Opensource developers, unless working on a project for money, only do what they need to do to get a project doing what THEY want it to do.

        • Opensource developers, unless working on a project for money, only do what they need to do to get a project doing what THEY want it to do.

          Hello!?!?!??

          What did you expect? Does Microsoft produce anything for free either? No, if they do something, it's for money.

          I tried to get my car fixed once, but they wouldn't do it except for money. People don't do things for free. Hello, what's wrong with people who expect to freeload???

          Pay up, or shut up.

          Thank you

          -Brent

    • Re:I have a client who is Japanese.. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unfortunately, Win2K support for Chinese input is not nearly as good as their support for Japanese. The Chinese IMEs are all keyboard-based, and quite frankly not up to the level of, say, TwinBridge.

      At the very least, Microsoft needs to update their Win2K Japanese pen-based IME to support the rest of the Asian character sets.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @06:09PM (#3834414)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Your client should try OS X before he makes his decision. OS X's keyboard support is somewhat better. Comparing OS 9 to Windows 2000 is a little like comparing Windows 3.1 to OS 9. Not at all fair. Mind you, the one thing you can say for Windows is that it has excellent support for EA languages.
    • You mean something like the Gnome Keyboard Applet [gnome.hu]?
    • ... this tiny bar that sits at the corner of your screen and lets you flip back and forth between English and several other character sets.
      It is called xcin in Linux land.
      ... I am highly doubtful that Linux developers can come up with anything better.
      Another FUD attempt. Do you have no shame?
      As it stands, I believe your friend's decision to not use Microsoft products may be a bit short-sighted, especially considering that this is one of my client's only reasons to switch to Windows from MacOS.
      No; I believe those who decided to use Microsoft products to be short-sighted.

      Microsoft needs to be destroyed.
    • ...and since I've had to write and test all of my PHP applications with the Japanese charset for him and his friends, I thought I would share my and his experiences.

      About six months ago, several of the string functions would badly munge Chinese. Things like ucword() (Capitalizes The First Letter Of Each Word), and such did not realize what they were working with, and produced results that the chinese literate testers said was "amusing". Easily avoided if you're writing a chinese only site, but it bit us in odd areas when we tried to bring on a few Chinese subscribers onto a large PHP driven service. Things might have changed - the people we were working with abruptly disappeared, so I dropped the project.

      --
      Evan "FWIW, YMMV, RTFM, IANAC, ETC"

    • Which part of he wants absolutely no Microsoft software anywhere near it didn't you understand?

      Shilling Microsoft solutions in answer to an article asking specifically how to do something without Microsoft software is not only offtopic, it is insulting to the intelligence of any reader not in the partisan throes of the pro-microsoft zealotry camp.

      Now, I'm not saying that there isn't something similar for Linux. But if Apple couldn't come up with anything more productive for MacOS 9, which was intended from the start to be a consumer-level, desktop, OS, I am highly doubtful that Linux developers can come up with anything better.

      So basically you are using your ignorance of GNU/Linux as an excuse for posting an offtopic response promoting your partisan software when in fact the only cognizant answer you could have possibly given would have been "I don't know."

      Indeed, even a fraction of research on your part would have allowed for a slightly more intelligent answer than "use Microsoft, it kicks Apple's ass and GNU/Linux can't possibly be any better than Apple, so it must suck!", for perhaps then you might have stumbled across the Linux Chinese HOWTO [ibiblio.org].

      Interestingly enough, both the Chinese and Taiwanese governments do not share your pessimism ... both are using and promoting GNU/Linux and discouraging further use of Microsoft Windows, and while it may or may not be as polished as Microsoft's Japanese IME implimentations, it should be noted that (a) Japanese' use of Kanji aside, Japanese isn't remotely the same as Chinese and (b) the Freedom (both financial and otherwise) afforded by using a Free operating system such as GNU/Linux, and actively taken away by submitting to a Microsoft based solution, vastly outweighs any amount of polish Microsoft could possibly offer.
    • Free and hundreds of Chinese hackers makes a big difference. RedFlag Linux http://www.redflag-linux.com/ is a Chinese specific distribution.

      Looks as if you were a little short sighted. By the way for Japanese try Turbo Linux

    • Re:I have a client who is Japanese.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Broccolist ( 52333 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @07:03PM (#3834585)
      I agree, Microsoft's CJK IME absolutely reigns over all. It's unified across most Windows applications, uses a very smart heuristic based on word frequency and grammar analysis (!), is highly configurable and even provides a box to draw characters with your mouse if you've forgotten their reading (which, amazingly, gives the correct result 99% of the time, even if I draw it really sloppily).

      I use it for my Japanese text editing and I was extremely impressed by the quality of their IME. I'm no big fan of MS in general, but I have to say that this is one place where their software is simply Right. I try to avoid using Japanese in unix so I haven't explored all the possibilities there, but the solutions I've seen have been comparatively weak and ad hoc. This is one place where Linux might have to catch up to MS, but they'll never do better.

    • According to my client, both mouse support (i.e. clicking the little bar and bringing up the language) and keyboard support (using key commands to change languages) are VASTLY more efficient in Windows 2000 than in MacOS 9.

      Wow. Just the kind of complex technology Microsoft would spend years researching: a button and a keyboard shortcut to change languages.

      Now, be serious. On MacOSX, enabling language switching via a menu appears once you select a second language. If you must, you can assign a keyboard shortcut. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't do something similar under MacOS9. Several Linux desktops, of course, have the same feature.

      But if Apple couldn't come up with anything more productive for MacOS 9, which was intended from the start to be a consumer-level, desktop, OS, I am highly doubtful that Linux developers can come up with anything better.

      You don't know the systems you are working with well and you admit to knowing nothing about the technologies you are judging. Yep, I guess you are perfectly qualified to be a high-priced consultant to some really clueless business.

    • You yourself admit that you haven't looked deeply into possible Linux solutions for Japanese input. I have found that skk with emacs [openlab.jp] in Linux is every bit as powerful, usable, and easy as anything Microsoft has to offer for Japanese input. Granted, it doesn't let you draw in a character, but I never use that anyway.

      Where linux may suffer a little bit is in the areas of printing and uniform input support across all applications (for example, skk only works in emacs). However, for writing Japanese-page php scripts, emacs is quite sufficient. Redhat 7.3 even includes skk by default, so you don't have to do anything special to install it.

      The story with Chinese is a little bit different ... I've been looking for about six years and I have not found anything in linux that matches the ease and comprehensiveness of Chinese language support in Windows 2000. So for anybody (such as the story poster) who is looking to handle Chinese in Linux: it can be done, but it is probably not as easy as in Windows.

    • I have a WIFE who is Chinese (Score:5, Informative)

      by philovivero ( 321158 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:57PM (#3835414) Homepage Journal
      Mod parent insightful.

      Notwithstanding all the "Linux trolls" who post "search Google" and "Here's a Chinese input project, it must be good," Linux just can't do Chinese (or Japanese) now.

      Let's put this in perspective. I've been Microsoft-free personally for about 5 years now. Both my laptops and all my workstations (at home and work) run Linux. That's about five machines running Linux now. I'm very happy.

      My wife knows nothing about computers. She doesn't know Windows, she doesn't know Linux. So I can install Linux for her, right? Wrong.

      Because Chinese input for Linux simply isn't as good as Microsoft Win2K.

      As the parent points out, the Microsoft Asian-input methods are well-thought out. They allow you to seamlessly shift into and out of English and Chinese (and Japanese).

      Chinese itself has at least three major input methods, each of which is a long, complicated process to implement. My wife reads/writes "Traditional Chinese" (what they read/write in Taiwan) as opposed to "Simplified Chinese" (what they read/write in China and what Red Flag Linux certainly only supports).

      Microsoft Win2K handles all Chinese and Japanese input methods so well that my wife and others who are actually from Mainland China are all happy.

      Linux doesn't seem to make anyone happy.

      Sure, there are projects out there. As the Linux Troll with a highly-rated comment mentioned earlier, "Search Google!" -- yeh, you'll get tons of hits, and every one of them will be a waste of your time.

      Maybe in another year or two.

      I'd be happy if someone who's actually used Chinese input on Linux and Win2K tell me there's something as good for Linux. I'll try it in a heartbeat. I've been waiting YEARS to get my wife off of Windows.

      Note: All this rant doesn't say much about Chinese *OUTPUT* -- Linux seems to display Big5 (traditional) and other Chinese/Japanese just fine. It's the input that's not ready yet.

      • You did not mention which Linux dostro's you actually tried.
        I assume there's a lot of difference between RedHat/Mandrake and RedFlag, which is aimed at the Chinese market/userbase.
      • I'm beginning to wonder if Microsoft isn't employing people to infect slashdot by posting pro-microsoft material. It goes something like this...

        I'm completely microsoft free except ... where linux isn't even close.

        You comment that you would like to see what someone who has actually used Chinese input on windows and linux implying that you yourself haven't. This makes you just as bad as the people telling you to RTFM or search google. There is a lot of BS that get's thrown around slashdot (quite a bit of which gets modded up) and yours just adds to it. I believe the person said they want nothing to do with windows, and I don't blame them. Heck, I learned LaTeX so I didn't have to use Office, but that's just me. How about when you learn to use Chinese input on Linux you compare them then ok? Until then shutup, if I want to hear windows advertising I'll call a MS rep.

        Now I don't know Chinese or Japanese or any other language with a different character set but there was a grad student in one of my classes who used linux exclusively and used an oriental language (not sure which I think Chinese though) Also I remember reading articles how Linux is really cathing on in China.... must be an easy way for them to input Chinese if it's catching on huh?
        -Chris
      • Notwithstanding all the "Linux trolls" who post "search Google" and "Here's a Chinese input project, it must be good," Linux just can't do Chinese (or Japanese) now.

        Right. Because Japanese is the 5th most well translated language for KDE 3.0, and has over 35,000 strings by magic. And Emacs-MULE (written by Japanese) was written by Windows users. And 4 MB of manpages for Japanese were also translated by Windows users. And the 34 Japanese Debian developers are just spies.
    • Mac OS 9's input support doesn't compare to this tiny bar that sits at the corner of your screen and lets you flip back and forth between English and several other character sets
      I'm fairly certain this type of feature is in MacOS 9, and I know it is in MacOS X. In MacOS X you enable it by going to System Preferences->International and click on the Keyboard Menu tab. Once you are there you can click on any number of input methods, character sets, and keyboard layouts and a menu will appear at the top of the screen which will allow you to switch input methods as often and easily as needed.

      You only need to set this once, since the preferences are persistent. If you want to remove the menu, just de-select all of the input methods except for one.

      The Japanese (Kanji?) input method opened up a second application as a helper, I'm not sure what it did since I don't read Japanese.
  • And how the hell do you get them to work with most applications?

    The same issue for chinese exists for Korean and Japanese, and is one of my major reasons for NOT moving to linux.

    Windows et. al. have this issue down to nothing, I can use Japanese in every program installed on my PC (that has windows handle the UI), but basic input of Japanese into linux seems almost impossible.

    One site wanted me to recompile the kernel just to add the suport. Another wanted me to rebuild all of my system libraries.

    Multilingual support for Asian languages is severely lacking in Linux.

    And I've tried Turbolinux, and on boot into X I got FVWM. That's REAL advanced.
    • I've been using RedHat, and Japanese in X from an english default just requires a few commands provided you have the proper packages installed(in 7.x at least).
      export LANG=ja_JP
      kinput2 -canna&
      export XMODIFIERS="@im=kinput2"
      Now everything launched from that shell will be in Japanese and support Japanese input(shift+space to activate). Alternately, you could just add those to your .xinitrc

      If you just want Japanese support and keep english dialogs and menus use:
      export LC_MESSAGES=en_US
      ... although I'm not yet sure how to get the font sizes to look normal.
    • I have xcin for Chinese, kinput2 for Japanese, and ami for Korean. All working under Linux with inputing. All working for Openoffice.org, for example.

      There is nothing to do with the kernel. However you need corresponding locale stuffs for glibc, which usually come with your Linux distribution.

  • Observations (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by W2k ( 540424 )
    A few things I mentally noted while reading this:

    a) I find it interesting how the "friend" mentioned in the article only specifies the brand and FSB frequency of the CPU of the system he wants. Most people would be more interested in things like the CPU clock speed, hard drive size, amount of RAM, et cetera. Also, having a high-speed front side bus does in no way gurantee a fast system.

    b) The link to the A7V333. Maybe I just had bad luck with my A7V, but I have woved never to buy an Asus product again after experiencing their horrible drivers, horrible support and in many cases badly designed products. My friends have had similar experiences, mostly with Asus 3D cards. I would not recommend Asus products to my worst enemy, and I would NOT put an Asus motherboard in a computer I built for a friend.

    c) Windows has excellent multi-language input support. Refusing to use Microsoft software is not in the best interest of someone who wants his chinese input support as good as possible. Not that there can't be good Chinese support in a Linux distro (I wouldn't know, having never researched the subject) but there is always the ease-of-use problem, which the posting also mentions.

    d) Finally, I'd say the OS Sucks-Rules-O-Meter is more of an indication of the amount of zealots for any given operating system than anything else. Also, it'd be interesting to see how much overlap there is between the "linux rules" and "windows sucks" result. I'm guessing quite a bit.

    Speaking of the OSSROM, if it is to be believed, then apart from Windows, MacOS, OS/400, Solaris and Unix are all operating systems that suck.

    • I've got lots of experience building PCs, going back over a decade ago to the earliest home computers all the way up to my current athlon, and lots of other hardware and software experience to boot (I'm comfortable with a soldering iron, with C++, and everything inbetween the two) - and I have to say that in my not so humble experience ASUS is a great motherboard brand. You do the community a disservice to push people onto inferior solutions.

      All motherboard companies have bad stories out there about support and drivers and whatnot. In the case of the A7V333 (I have one too), there's nothing wrong with it as a KT333 implementation. Really, it's one of the better ones around. The problems that exist are mostly the KT333's fault. If you don't like the KT333, ASUS offers alternative boards with just about every other chipset under the sun to meet your needs.
  • is to have the fortune program in your login script...

    -RickTheWiseGuy

  • Try Redhat (Score:3, Informative)

    by kir ( 583 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @05:57PM (#3834370)

    I only say this because the default install, when selecting Japanese as the primary language, worked right out the box for my wife. She's had no complaints (she actually loves the speed improvement over Windoze), although cannaserver, etc don't work exactly like windoze, but she picked it up quickly. Even the man pages are in Japanese. Need an English man page, simply do a

    LANG="en_US"; export LANG

    and you're in bidness.

    I say all this GUESSING that the support for Chinese in Redhat will be just as good, if not better, as the Japanese support.

    Oh, BTW, Abiword does do internationalization. As does Mozilla, Sylpheed (this thing rocks!), gqview. The basics are covered, but you probably already knew that.

  • Using chinese with Mandrake (Score:5, Informative)

    by Little Hamster ( 586231 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @05:58PM (#3834372)
    The chinese how-to will tell you what most of the software does. It's at the usual place - http://www.tldp.org.

    Mandrake comes with
    1. chinese input (both big5 and gb) with xcin.
    2. cjk latex for editing (if you already know how to use latex, of course)
    3. mozilla is big 5 (gb?) aware already
    4. there's a chinese shell somewhere on the disk
    5. emacs works with big5 input without xcin.

    Fonts, locales and even some manpages and howtos also comes with the distribution. The only thing I haven't got working is actually displaying chinese in the title bars and window manager toolbars.
    • Damn - no mod points. Some kind soul mod the parent up as spot on please :-)

      My wife (mainland chinese) had the same problem when writing up her thesis (needed English & Chinese). CJK Latex is cool - it's the cleanest way to use latex for asian language support (other solutions required patches to the latex binary and worse). Results are good even with the standard fonts.
      xemacs-mule is what she used for editing and she found the IME (GB2312 - simplified chinese)
      quite usable and familiar.

      (For anyone who wonders how this works, you just type phonetically and during each syllable entered a "tie-breaker" list appears with numbered options of all the characters with similar sounds - then hit the number - it is possible to type at a respectable speed. Several IME's exist - not all phonetic - I suppose one chooses the best according to job or taste).

      Yeah - it's not ideal - but it got the job done on a popular linux distro (Mandrake 8.0) with minimum fiddling.

      Just doing the next set up upgrades in our house and I'll be trying to do a better job this time round.
  • You will be screwing your friend, since that MOBO only supports a 200 or 266FSB. It does however, support memory running at 333mhz (pc2700). Not quite the same thing.
  • Opera 6.02 for Linux Released - July 3, 2002 [opera.com]

    Opera Software today continued its Linux Bonanza Week with a public release of Opera 6.02 for Linux. The new version includes important fixes to the document and user interface, with special emphasis on the display of Asian characters, making this an important upgrade for Linux users all over the world.

    More at: http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2002/07/2002 0703_2.html [opera.com]

    and...

    Opera waves the red flag in China [opera.com]

    In China, the government has moved to install the open-source Linux operating system provided by Red Flag in an attempt to avoid reliance on U.S. companies, particularly Microsoft. The successful RedFlag formula will now be replicated in the embedded market.

    "After dominating the Chinese desktop market, RedFlag is now poised to move into the embeddded market," says Danny Huang, geveral manager embedded products, Redflag Software Technologies Co., Ltd. "With Opera on board as a partner, RedFlag now offers the very best in embedded systems solutions for the Chinese market."

    Press release here: http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2002/07/2002 0701_2.html [opera.com]

    • I hope that RedFlag will have good support for traditional characters. The two major reasons for using simplified are now gone: 1) Some consider traditional characters easier to read and, now that we have keyboards, they are just as easy to write. 2) There are no longer any reasons to keep "the masses" from being able to read pre-communist documents encoded in the traditional characters.

  • Look at TurboLinux? (Score:5, Informative)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @06:17PM (#3834445) Homepage Journal
    They were one of the first general Linux distros with DBCS support and the product has simplified and traditional Chinese support.
  • Or maybe I should say "was great". I used cxterm (Chinese xterm) under RedHat 5.0. Its input methods were great, it had some data files containing common multi-character combinations, so if you typed one or two characters, it would show you a list of guesses about what character it thought comes next, and quite often the one I wanted would be right there at the top of the list.

    However, I've never been able to get it working under later versions of RedHat, i.e. RH6. I think it has something to do with the way termcap stuff was changed; under RH6, cxterm's display keeps getting mangled. I tried recompiling the sources, and I even tried just taking a statically linked executable built under RH5 and running on RH6, and it still doesn't work. In fact, I keep my old laptop running RH5, mainly so I can ssh into it and run cxterm remotely.

    But the emacs that comes with later versions of RedHat can display Chinese pretty well. You want to be sure you've got the emacs-leim package installed. Emacs also has some Chinese input methods, but I can't seem to find the documentation for them, so I haven't been able to try them out yet.

  • Not 333MHz FSB (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The AthlonXP doesn't have a 333MHz FSB, not even the new 0.13u release, it's still 266MHz the 333MHz simply refers to the memory bus.

    And the point of having a larger memory bus that's not matched by the FSB is? Well... bragging rights?
  • DDR333 is here now, but you won't see a 333MHz FSB until Hammer hits the scene. According to Toms' Hardware [tomshardware.com], you won't even see it in Barton. While a DDR333 connection to the northbridge might be nice for smp setups, it'll be wasted connected by a 133 MHz DDR interface to one cpu. It'll help [anandtech.com], just not as much as it should.

  • I'm on Debian and... (Score:5, Informative)

    by pigeonhk ( 42292 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @06:57PM (#3834556) Homepage
    I'm using Debian with working Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

    Basically you have you sort out locale packages, fonts, and then inputing method (XIM), and lastly the apps you want to use chinese.

    For locale, most distributions include proper and working locale packages. So all you have to do is install them. Locale packages are related to glibc btw. The way locale packages work has changed a bit from glibc 2.1 to 2.2. But anyway both work well.

    And then for fonts. Most of the time, you need both X fonts (.bdf files) and truetype fonts. Both are quite easy to get on the net if your distribution of Linux doesn't include them. They are all in Debian, for example. And I think a chinese distribution like RedFlag will include a bunch of them.

    For chinese, I use xcin for inputing. It supports big5 and gb encoding, and also all sorts of common inputing method, such as changjei, bopomofo, cantonese, etc. There are also people developing custom inputing method you can use with xcin, such as smartcj [scj2000.net]

    Finally, applications to use. To start with, I think it's a must to have a terminal which works with the language you need. For example, I have crxvt (chinese rxvt). And so I can run all sort of text based programs with chinese working straight away.

    Most of the time all you need is to do:

    export LANG=zh_TW.Big5 XMODIFIERS=@im=xcin

    for your environment. Run the inputing method, and then run your applications. Most applications will work pretty well with XIM.

    For office software, I've tried Openoffice.org only, with inputing working. Sometimes it is buggy, but usable. As long as you have truetype fonts installed and Openoffice.org knows about those fonts, you're sorted. Printing works straight away too. While, Staroffice doesn not work properly with XIM, for some reasons.

    I haven't tried any chinese linux distribution, but I imagine they might be even much more easier to setup for chinese.

    Just a note for Japanese and Korean. I have kinput2 with canna server, kterm for Japanese. hanterm and ami for Korean. Both kinput2 and ami work with Openoffice.org, too.

  • Turbolinux (Score:2, Informative)

    by Coppertone ( 10332 )
    If you want fairly good Chinese support I think you can try Turbolinux 7 - they are bigger then Redhat in China because they have a much better chinese input method support and stuff - and I have tried it myself! You can switch between chinese and english just like that!
    • I do not want to use TurboLinux because, afaik, TL made some modifications to the kernel without GPLing them. They said those modifications are 'add-on' thus not GPL them.

      I don't want to run a Linux with non-GPL components in it. If I do, why not W2K? :)

      I might be wrong, because they might have changed the license term by now....have they?
  • Redflag Linux, not to be redundant, is the ideal candidate. As for weather it is as high quality and feature rich as the "big" distros. Well here is a review [newsforge.com] of the english redflag distro. It looks impressive. Undoubtably the Chinese version is much better the English one.
  • Use the distro from Linpus: http://www.linpus.com/product/linux-8.2.htm

    Open Office:

    http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.0/ in dex.html#zhtw

    And simply order a keyboard from ANY Chinese computer shop:

    http://www.kingtech.com.tw/readme1.asp

  • Debian, KDE, true-type fonts = beautiful Zhong Wen (Score:5, Informative)

    by Daniel Franklin ( 60786 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @07:44PM (#3834717)
    I have set up a Chinese environment under Debian - it works beatifully, easily better than any Chinese input/output system under Windows. The key ingredients:

    * KDE 2.2.2
    * ttf-arphic-* true type fonts (traditional and simplified are available)
    * XCIN, with a little tweaking to get it working properly - does Pinyin input, which most people prefer
    * locales - make sure your /etc/locale.gen includes the zh_CN GB2312 line (or equivalnet Big5 traditional encoding) and run locale-gen
    * environment variables - there is a Debian Chinese HOWTO which tells you what you need to set.

    The key thing is the fonts (turn on anti-aliasing in KDE, make sure your X windows is set up to support this). The Arphic AA fonts look utterly magnificent, easily the best chinese fonts around. KDE supports X input (i.e. XCIN) quite happily, so you can use KOffice etc. and type in Chinese without a problem.

    One of these days I'll get around to writing a HOWTO to explain exactly how it works - if you want details, pester me by e-mailing daniel at ieee dot uow dot edu dot au.

  • Although I can't speak from personal experience, you'll probably wan to check out Hancom Office (http://www.hancaom.com/ [hancaom.com] or Chinese http://www.hancom.com.tw/ [hancom.com.tw]) for an office suite. It's a commercial suite by a Korean company and will likely have better Chinese support than open suites.

  • Using Chinese in Linux (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I am at this moment using Red Hat 7.0 with CLE,
    the Chinese Linux Extensions, version 1.0. For
    Chinese in console mode, it has jmcce; in X, both
    KDE and GNOME have been pretty thoroughly
    localized, though I prefer mwm and rxvt. Chinese
    input is no problem with a standard keyboard;
    there are more input methods than you can shake a
    stick at. We also bought the Hancom Office suite.
    Made for Asian languages, and more to my tastes
    than StarOffice or anything else I've seen.
  • You can buy the 333 boards, and the 2700 memory, but AMD processors don't actually support anything better than a 133DDR=266 FSB speeds. You will only see a very marginal improvement in performance between 266 and 333 at this point in time. But the good thing is that AMD will come out with 166ddr=333 FSB support sometime soon, and popping one of these new processors in your existing mobo will allow true 333 FSB speeds.
  • RedHatis aparently shipping their latest LIMBO release with UTF-8 locales as the default. This is actually pretty impressive and somewhat scary. A lot of software supports UTF-8 but it's not been proven unlike the region specific encodings like ISO-8859's. I think the big hold up was Bash but apparently that's been worked out. I don't know if this helps with Chinese though. A suspect a lot of programs meant to be used with Chinese probably do so by using a locale specific to Chinese (and not UTF-8) but I'm straining my knowledge of the topic.
  • I got Japanese support working after some time, for chinese it's basically the same:
    1.) get yourself the Microsoft Uni MS TTF
    2.) install kinput2, canna and cannaserver
    3.) read the how-tos linked in previous comments
    4.) set all the X-Applications to using the font in 1.
    5.) create yourself a shortcut which sets a few environment variables and then open all your applications in it
    6.) you can switch on/off kanji-input by typing +

    done :)
  • We played with a lot of different distros and versions in both Taiwan ( Big 5 Char Set) and China (GB Char Sets) over the years. What we found is that Mandrake 8.x supports pretty well out of the box with a little tweaking. Check out some screenshots: http://mandrake.hemeihr.com/ [hemeihr.com] We installed some extra Chinese fonts (there is a serious lack of pretty simplified and traditional Chinese fonts that are copylefted), and the staff gets work done WITHOUT any MS junkola on the 20+ linux boxen in China.

    Open Office supports both simplified and traditional char sets in version 1.0, very nice.

    Turbolinux is alright, but we found the distro behind in general app versioning AND a bit unstable compared with Mandrake.

    Redflag is still not there either, but is improving slowly. Not really good for a good working environment yet.

    We just recently installed RedHat 7.3 in Chinese on two boxes, it may be our distro of choice if further tests are as smooth as our initial findings :) It is fast, Chinese is attractive, and it seems pretty stable. The development guys have been preaching about it over the past two weeks.

    Oh yeah, KDE3 in Chinese rocks. Gnome 2.0 in Chinese is OK.

    My 1.9 cents.

  • What? I can't believe I see people praising Microsoft here. Even though their software is good, they're evil, right?
    *
  • Hancom is based in Korea and has what is supposed to be an excellent office suite that does Korean, Japanese, Chinese (simplified & traditional) and Arabic. The also sell Hancom Linux, which is Red Hat 7.1 w/KDE all configed to one of the above languages.

    They are also into Zarus PDA software and at one time were discussing partnership with The Kompany.

    Check out http://www.hancom.com/ for more details. You might also want to check out TurboLinux, which is supposed to be big in Asia-Pacific.
  • There is a list of Chinese distros [distrowatch.com] [distrowatch.com] here and distrowatch also mentions the major distros [distrowatch.com] [distrowatch.com] that can handle Chinese. These are Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian and Turbo Linux.
  • Is there a significant number of contributors to Linux writing in Chinese?
  • Disclaimer

    I am not Chinese and do not speak Chinese, however I am working in China and was trying to introduce Linux. The following text treats Chinese == simplified, however most of the stuff should be valid for traditional too.

    Introduction

    First of all, Chinese under Linux is hell. There seem to be no people being interested in developing open source in China. And if they do then it's difficult to find, crappy and unfinished. Just look at the Mozilla 1.0 simplified Chinese translation [mozilla.org], it's not there, the guys did not move since 0.9.8. The Chinese HOWTO [ibiblio.org] is quite old (1998!) and most of the links are dead and the information inside useless (practical experience).

    Red alternatives

    You have several alternatives, I suggest you forget about them: RedFlag Linux [redflag-linux.com] (Experience based on 3.0, Redflag 3.2 beta ISO [rceplus.com])
    I had to use the text installation: I guess it was unicode without unicode support, so all I saw was messy characters but not Chinese. Somehow it's similar to redhat so I was able to click through. After the installation: whoops, the system is asking me for my registration key otherwise I can try RedFlag linux for 40 days (? do not remember how many exactly). It was not just a key, it was one of the Microsoft dimensions. After choosing the trial I ended up in Kde trying to look like windows. It had a tray, and a start bar, the Control Panel and so on. But I had a feeling it was there but it could not satisfy me, and I could not stand the little penguin patriotically holding that red flag up. The Chinese input seems to me to be the most advanced, but the system it self seemed to me unstable. Most modifications were in the interface and trying to lock down the system so you need to get that key after the trial period.

    Office: RedOffice [ch2000.com.cn] different company, same red. It's OpenOffice 1.0 [openoffice.org] looking like Office XP, that's all except there is no source code, no binaries, only a trial version and a price of 398RMB (~50US$) for the full version. Stick with Chinese OpenOffice.

    Mandrake 8.2

    Mandrake [mandrake-linux.com] has in my opinion the best Chinese support. You only need to install it using the Chinese language. If you install it using English and then switch to Chinese you will have several problems, like you desktop disappearing etc. Do not use Unicode, use gb or big5 only, I was not able to see anything by switching to Unicode.

    After the installation you should have a Chinese kde, Chinese Mozilla 0.9.8 and some more software in Chinese. The best input for simplified is Chinput, for Big5 Xcin and that's how Mandrake is doing it, if you use gb you will get Chinput by pressing Ctrl+Space and Xcin on a Big5 system.

    Turbolinux seems to have taken over the Chinput project, therefore you will find no info on the net. They made an extension to Chinput called ZWinPro (ZWinPro-3.2-11.i586.rpm) you need to forceinstall it (solve some libary deps, install unicon but do not uninstall Chinput) and forceinstall Mandrakes Chinput again. This will give you Mandrakes Chinput with a configuration toolbar and some binaries which allow you to use Chinese input for all applications. There are some minor probs you will need to fix (font alias missing, etc), if you have trouble contact me.

    The only problem about Chinput (and probably Xcin) is: it's dumb, the windows input tries to guess what you are typing. Means, you need to write character by character on Linux, does not matter if you use Pinyin or Woubi (or what ever you call it). This is very unconvenient and a killer for every Chinese linux desktop. Nobody will want to type 10 min on Linux when he can be finished in 2 on windows.

    Next get the Chinese version of OpenOffice1.0 and English Mozilla 1.0. If you want to use a Chinese browser stick to konqueror, Mozilla 0.9.8 is not stable and crashes randomly.

    You will want to get some Chinese ttf fonts from windows, as the fonts on Mandrake are quite ugly.

    paul

  • There's a new input method system called Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework (IIIMF). It was released to the free software community by Sun just over 2 years ago. Currently it's hosted [li18nux.org] at Li18nux.

    Among its advantages over the old X Input Method (XIM) system are:

    • Not tied to X Window anymore. It should be possible to write an IIIMF client for a console app. In fact there's a sample client implementation for Emacs.
    • Not tied to the old locale/encoding model; everything is in Unicode. For example it is possible to enter Chinese in en_US locale.
    • Being Sun, IIIMF uses a client/server model. Theoretically an IIIMF client can access an IIIMF server on a Beowulf cluster...

    Disclaimer: I am a voting member on the Li18nux Steering Commitee, and I'm also working on a commercial Chinese IIIMF input method for my employer.

  • you can put that memory bandwidth to good use. Normally, the asus board [asus.com] , using the via kt333 [via.com.tw] chipset, runs the fsb at 133MHz DDR and the memory bus at 166MHz DDR (if you have PC2700 memory). In order to get that extra memory bandwidth to the cpu, you have to increase the fsb clock to 166MHz DDR. If you're not into overclocking you cpu 25%, then you have to lower the clock mulitplier to compensate. The asus board offers a 1/5 clock divider for your pci bus so all your other devices can run in spec. Have fun :).

    P.S. The MHz stuff.
    MHz only means millions of cycles per second. Exactly what that means depends on how you define "cycle". If you're using the accepted definition of a cycle, in terms of memory, then you're talking about a cycle bounded by the event which occurs every time your bus does this:

    _
    / \_/

    (I'm not the best ascii artist but you get the idea) and the memory bus operates at 166MHz. However, if you're calling a cycle the event that occurs every time the bus can put a bit on a data line, then the memory bus operates at 333MHz. Either way, you're still going to get a maximum throughput of 2.7GB/s.

    P.P.S.
    If you want to change your fsb from 133MHz to 166MHz then you have to get a cpu with a rated frequency into which 166 will divide nicely. That means the XP 2000+ (1666MHz) or the XP 1500+ (1333MHz). If you get any other processor, you'll have to overclock or underclock a little since the cpu multiplier can only be set to multiples of 1/2.
  • I'd tell him to buy a PowerMac G4 system and run Lotus Notes or WordPerfect ..... There "IS" Microsoft Office X which works awesome.

    Microsoft on the Mac side is not at all the same beast as it is on the PC side. The Microsoft Mac programmers work much truer to spec than the PC programmers for Microsoft.

    Internet Explorer on the Mac renders pages more like netscape does then IE on the PC. It's crazy. Things that Netscape complains about on and IE doesn't on the PC, IE on Mac complains also ..
  • I have used Linux combined with Chinese enviroment for a long time. I always think Gnome is the best, it is fast, flexible and easy to use. There is a trick. If you are not used to read Chinese menu, tool bar and prompt, you can change the locale setting from zh_CN.GB2312 to zh_CN in RedHat or Mandrake. You still can use Chinese, but menu and the other things will be English. It is very convenient.

    I use Openoffice 1.0 for a while, it is great and very easy to add some new truetype fonts and utf8 fonts. And it is compatible with Chinese XIM(like Chinput). If you think Openoffice starts very slowly, you can download ooqstart-gnome from rpmfind.net or .deb from debian website if you use debian.

    Have any problem, e-mail me at river@linguistic-alchemy.com

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