I am a part-time Chinese-English translator thinking of making the switch to Linux. As an utter newbie, I'm hoping that some of you might be able to offer me advice as to which distributions and input methods you have found most efficient. I need a setup that supports both Traditional (Big 5) and Simplified (GB) character input and display. Excepting a bit of graphics and web design work, for the most part all I intend to do is multilingual word processing and check my e-mail. I would be amenable to a Chinese distribution but would prefer an English one with a Chinese overlay. Thanks.

Erm, not being a mandarin/cantonese/whatever speaker, I couldn't say for certain, but I have seen a lot of mentions in regards to "asiatic/oriental" languages and support when looking at stuff for mandrake (your reference to Big 5 made me remember because I didn't understand what it was).

You could check out mandrakes site and see what they have to offer, also have a look at "distrowatch" they can tell you an awful lot about stuff that you may find relevant.

I have also seen lots of mentions about chinese language distributions but if you check out google.com/linux and follow "whichever" language you are comfortable with/needing.

Hope this helps?

regards

John

My only experience in Linux is redhat 7.2, 8 and 9,
The three edition can display and input Simplified (GB) and Traditional (Big 5) character.
In redhat 7.2, should do some works to achieve this,
8 and 9 are simpler to do this.
My Traditional Chinese is poor, I am haven't input in Traditional
Chinese, I am not sure about this.
Here are some Chinese Linux websites,
http://www.linuxsir.com
http://www.linuxfans.org
Hope this is helpful.

Thanks XB; [www.linuxfans.org] looks quite useful. Would you be willing to comment on the input method you've used in Redhat 8 and 9? I assume it uses pinyin; does it predict strings of characters (a la Windows IME) or only allow you input one character at a time (as on a Mac)? Thanks again.