I need help. I'm using Linux Mandrake 10 Official.

Does anybody know how to switch your keyboard layout, or rather be able to switch from alphabet characters to Japanese characters. I want to be able to type nonalphabet characters with my keyboard on my computer.

I tried doing it from configure your desktop > keyboard layout (Index tab) > Layout Tab; I enable keyboard layouts and add a layout from the available layouts, then I click on the Xkb Options tab and enable Xkb options and click apply. Then on the panel (taskbar) I switch from US to Japanese, and when I tried to type some characters, I still cannot type any Japanese characters.

Please help

Thank you in advance.

first, just want to make clear which distro you are running, because in your post you say it is Mandrake, but below your nick name it says the distro you use is Fedora...so which one is it?

In respect to what you need, you might have to get an external program, like the Chinese Star program that I use to type chinese characters. Have you ever used one?
I know there is for Korean as well.
I'm not sure about Japanese, I've never been into Japanese language so I've never tried looking for a program I can use to write japanese.

There is also another program called... NJstar maybe that one has japenese...however I don't think they support Linux...so it's a toughy....

I used to use Fedora, I switched to Mandrake a while back ago.

I never used any of those programs you mentioned. It:s funny, I:m able to make the whole OS(linux) look all Japanese with the menus showing everything in Japanese, but I`m not able to type any asian characters.

Or has anybody solved this problem before?

yeah, you can convert all the menu's to more than 200 languages, but you can't write in all those languages with regular software....you must use a program to write...specially when it comes to laguages with characters, or to arab languages.

Thanks zLinuxz. I guess I have to look for a program then....if there's any/

Does anybody know where I can get this programs?

Please let me know.

From what I've learned you actually need four things. First, you need to enable Japanese support in Linux itself (for file names and other command line stuff. Second, you need a Japanese character server. There are 2 or 3 to choose from; The big ones are Canna and Wnn, I believe. Third, you need an input client, the program that actually lets you type the kanji. Wnn has a client. There's also kinput2. Finally, you need to make sure your applications support the Japanese character set. I believe this last one is becoming less of a problem than it use to be.

Note that this is just from what I've read up on so far. I haven't actually gotten such a system running yet. If you want to run a Japanese-only system, it's pretty easy. But if you want to mix an English interface with Japanese input, it becomes quite confusing. There doesn't seem to be any easy way to integrate the two together. I've put it aside for now myself, but eventually I'm going to get back to it and get my system working with both. I want to get everything else working right first though.

Here are a couple of links I've found about it They may give you a start. The first one is more thorough but a bit dated. The second one is specific to Mandrake, so it might help you the most. Be sure to come back and tell us what happened with it so that others can benefit from your experiences.

http://www.tlug.jp/craigoda/writings/linux-nihongo/
http://merkel.zoneo.net/Linux/japinput.php?lang=en

Thanks david for the input...I willl experiment with what you suggested and I'll post the results.

Take a look at this post:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=109189