how to make linux display Japanese characters?
 

Now my Linux(turbolinux8) can correctly load the Japanese 106 key keyboard map, and when i set the environment vars as:
1)
export LANG=ja_JP.eucJP
export LC_ALL=ja_JP.eucJP
the help text of some program such as tar became unreadable, i think that tar think i'm in a Japanese environment so it just output Japanese help infos, but these characters were not correctly displayed in Japanese characters.(they were displayed as some wild ASCII code)

2)
export LANG=ja_JP.utf8
export LC_ALL=ja_JP.utf8
this completely have no effect on the help info of tar, still in English.

So may i know, how to make my system correctly display Japanese characters and different charset(euc, utf8, etc.) should be used under what cucumstances.
And it's reasonable that there must be some Japanese font files in my system, where are they? If i happend to live without these files, where should i get them and where to install.

i'm astonished that no single person know how to do this?:eek: :eek:

So dose anyone know how to add some internationalization support to linux(just as i18n), not limit to JAPANESE , other characters also ok, Just like Chinese , or maybe western characters.

Please help me, plz, I know there MUST BE a way.

Bert, r u there? You must know, right:D

do you have the cannaserver installed? I know that it's used to display kana... not sure about kanji though.

Right.

Here's how to switch between the two.

First of all, make sure cannaserver, canna, kinput2 and all the Japanese fonts are installed. The canna stuff must be configured to run at boot time.

This is no small task, and if you can, it's always better to enable Japanese from the install menu, when you first install your distro.

Once you have these installed and configured to run at boot time, add this to your ~/.bash_profile

and you can enable Japanese for all the output messages and screens. By pressing Shift+Space, you can type hiragana. The system is not perfect, and Windows IME does it a lot better. Linux does have some small advantages though.

Good luck

Bert

Actually, you have RH8. Use the Kickstart configurator to include Japanese language support.

Thank all of you :)

The Linux distro I'm using at home is RH8, but the one I'm using at work is TurboLinux8.

I just happened to installed TL8 without correct Japanese display support (but i DO installed some Japanese support i think).

Today I reinstalled it with full Japanese support, I even installed UNICON , which was really cool :) and not only support Japanese. Yeah~~~~~~~~~~~! :D

omedetou.

and sorry if the spelling is off... it's been a year since I finished japanese 2... I need to review before college. -.- lol

Japanese support
 

Well, I am jealous! You got the systems do what you need.
I need to write Japanese/Russian/English.
My Linux doesn't write in Japanese/Russian, although it does display all correctly in the needed programs.

There is no option to reinstall the whole system (after it has been nicely configured!). Please, lead me - where to start in order to get a full Japanese/Russian support?

I posted a question at madrakeexpert. No answer. It seems, no one knows. When you need to know something about shell etc. its a great place to go.

Thank you,
linuxfond

well, to be honest, i'm quite new to linux and now am not using linux(though it is installed).

this post was posted because i need to try to install a linux machine at work, and it is not my business now.

what i can help you is to tell you that u may try to install
the unicon in the form of rpm or compile it from source, i just not sure, for my case, it's just all installed and configured after installation. Maybe canna server, i seems to be connected to Japanese input.

if u meant to display Japanese in Xwindow, i think it's easy, u can just install the language support from XFree86(some font i think).

Well, since i'm a real newbie(see my rank :), so i cannot help u much, sorry.

Thank you anyway. I will try. I don't have canna server installed. Jserver is running and it helps to receive email written in Japanese or open Japanese documents in StarOffice etc., but it doesn't allow to write in Japanese.
Best regards!

Does anybody actually know how to use unicon once it's installed? I've attempted to run it with:

unicon --jis

It doesn't seem to do anything... any suggestions?

hmmm... I haven't gone any further than choosing a jp keyboard. It types katakana without giving a choice of converting it to hiragana or kanji. quite useless...

Another thing that would be of help is another input method, but I had no luck getting kinput2 to compile... it docs said it would be compatible with jserver (which is configured to run at boot time), but I'm not too sure how to set up the config file properly so that kinput2 will compile. Were you able to figure out how to do that linuxfond (or anybody familiar with Mandrake 9.0)?

deuce,
I have not done it yet. I just installed japanese support during install. Now all I can do is choose a jp keyboard through MCC (Mandrake Control Center) and type katakana. That's all. Its not useful because I can not convert katakana into anything else, I can't type romaji or hiragana.
Its strange anyway because japanese keyboard normally has hiragana on it.
I was busy with other things, so I did not have the time to set up these japanese things to work. In a mean time I use a japanese PC of my wife.

Well, I got it working, there is one drawback, the iconbar in my fluxbox displays Japanese 'gozen' and 'gogo' for time (in kanji). Luckily I can read that, but I only know 170 odd kanji. My vocab sucks, I needed Japanese text support for school.

Thankfully I have it now.
Thanks for all your help, one problem is sometimes my k/aterminal says random numbers followed by a '$' but there is no other changes.