On 23-May-03 John wrote:

On Friday 23 May 2003 06:25, Ted Harding wrote:

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On 23-May-03 Fred A. Miller wrote:

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http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?aid=11261 Quote from same: [...] "We need a system, which is safe and can operate in 11 languages - soon 20," he said.

Don't know about "safe", but I think they may have a point where languages are concerned (yes, I know you can configure Linux for a given language, or locale, with a wide choice, but running a multi-lingual Linux is not trivial).

Ted.

This may be true, I don't know, since I've never tried it. But how much 'simpler' is it in an M$ OS?

John

Taking the opportunity to respond to two mails at the same time. John also wrote:

I mean hell mabel, how many languages does Linux support...at least 20 isn't it?

Well, yes, and I don't know how many but it's dozens! However, mostly it's one language at a time, especially in X. The basic reason for this is continued reliance on the various 256-character encodings: iso-8859-1 to iso-8859-10 (including 8859-5 and koi-8 for Cyrillic, 6 for Arabic, 7 for Greek, 8 for Hebrew which are non-Latin fonts, plus encodings for Chinese and Japanese, etc.). For any application which is based on this system, you are in one encoding only at any one time. So if you want to create a document in mixed English and Russian, say, then either the English or the Russian part of the text will look wrong. What Linux lacks is a good range of applications which are truly multilingual. On the other hand, if you are using say MS word then you have direct access (by default) to a much wider range of characters all at the same time. I haven't counted them, but they're in 29 groups which include "Basic Latin", "Latin-1", "Latin Extended-A", "Latin Extended-B", "Basic Greek", "Cyrillic", "Basic Hebrew", "Hebrew Extended", "Basic Arabic", "Arabic Extended", ... . You can drop these straight in to your document. It's also possible to buy extras. As far as I know, this is achieved by a mixture of single-byte and multibyte encoding (on the lines of Unicode). WordPerfect had similar resources, organised on similar lines, many years ago. Linux, on the other hand, has been flirting with Unicode for a while but development of Unicode Linux is still in its infancy. If you're using text-formatting software like TeX or groff, where you can install arbitrary numbers of fonts and design your own tags to access them, then you can certainly create documents in any number of languages at once, and view them (semi-WYSIWYG) as you write. But these are exceptions. Basically, Linux still has some way to go to adapt to multilingual use. A "head-to-head" between Linux and Windows in a multilingual contest would not flatter Linux, except for some specialised software and then only in the hands of experts. On the other hand someone with knowledge of the languages but otherwise only "secretarial" skills can easily write in a mixture of English, Czech, Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic by just typing away in MS Word. I hope this clarifies this issue! Best wishes, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 23-May-03 Time: 21:20:40 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday 23 May 2003 15:20, Ted Harding wrote: <snip>

Basically, Linux still has some way to go to adapt to multilingual use. A "head-to-head" between Linux and Windows in a multilingual contest would not flatter Linux, except for some specialised software and then only in the hands of experts. On the other hand someone with knowledge of the languages but otherwise only "secretarial" skills can easily write in a mixture of English, Czech, Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic by just typing away in MS Word.

I hope this clarifies this issue!

Best wishes, Ted.

Drat. So there *is* a sore spot in Linux. This can be the greatest 'hold up' of it being adapted (at least outside the US, since I'd be willing to bet that 99% of *anyone* who uses M$ here only uses english and *nothing* else on the OS...if that makes sense) outside the US, since most other countries will, at the very least, have bi-lingual users. This is kind of a bummer, ya know? <sigh>...I wish I was smarter and knew how to program and try to help out in this area. John - -- I needed fresh bugs for my SuSE gecko, and Linux penguin. So I went out and caught this huge ugly blue and red and green and yellow butterfly. They won't need fresh food for 3 months now. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+z6khH5oDXyLKXKQRAiy9AJ0YPIqczRSx7BrVPhcwHqnxc+S43QCfXQW1 lwUJJlJpMtEmaHAEg6t/6NU= =o97O -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

The 03.05.26 at 11:15, Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

I thought SUSE already did make a multilingual ability via the user directorys initialization script; such that at user setup you could set their language preference.

True. But it is far from perfect: not all programs seems to respect it. For example, If I issue "LANG=es_ES man man" I get the Spanish man page for man, but not many man pages have been translated. Then, program may or may not have their internal strings translated: there is a library to do this on the fly, and SuSE has it. For example, in "/usr/share/locale/es/LC_MESSAGES" there are many translation files, like, for example, "gimp.mo". Thus, if I call "LANG=es_ES gimp" I get Gimp in Spanish, instead of the default English. But again, not all programs are supported. Then, there are programs like "OpenOffice" that you can get in many languages: but I think the translations are embedded and can not be changed on the same system for different users - at least, I don't know how. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson

John wrote:

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On Thursday 22 May 2003 22:49, Fred A. Miller wrote:

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http://www.euobserver.com/index.phtml?aid=11261

Are these guys at the UN stupid or what? Going from what RØmer said "We need a system, which is safe and can operate in 11 languages - soon 20," , they didn't even look at a linux distro or even try one. I mean hell mabel, how many languages does Linux support...at least 20 isn't it? And what does he mean by "safe"? Someone should have asked him to show us how an M$ OS was 'safer' than an Linux OS. Someone should have asked him how many times he sees security breaches and vulnerabilities in headlines and security watch places about M$' OS and how many he's seen for Linux. The whole thing smells like corruption and kickbacks to me. They even had to try to make it look like poor little Ballmer was soooo put out and made to lose out on his 'ski' time. The whole article was pathetic and made to try and make anyone reading it sympathize with M$.

this seems to be a common thing now...I don't know what country you're in, but here in the US, there is a recent microsoft commercial that gives the impression that microsoft is amazed at what people can do...so they (microsoft) are in business to help you achieve your goals/dreams. Now if this isn't a PR attempt to improve their public perception as a cheating, stealing, lying bunch of bastards - I don't know what is. Every time I see it I feel the "bullshit" factor go through the roof!

John - -- A butterfly is: Pretty,soft,harmless...and useless, just like M$N. My Penguin and my Gecko eat butterflies. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux)

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