Joe Tomcat
I am currently trying to test some web sites in Japanese. I need to be able to input Japanese text into fill-in forms. I am using Suse 8.1, US edition. I am having a terrible time finding the software I need to accept the input, and then activating that software to accept input. On my other machine, running Redhat 8.0, with kinput2 and cannad already installed
kinput2 and canna are included in SuSE Linux 8.0 as well. Just install the packages kinput2, canna, cannadic with YaST2. Start canna by typing as root /etc/init.d/canna start Now canna is running (it will start automatically during the next boot as well).
and running, there seems to be no way to tell it to actually use kinput2.
The environment variable XMODIFIERS needs to be set: export XMODIFIERS=@im=kinput2 To start kinput2 automatically when your X session starts, make sure you have ~/.xim and ~/.xinitrc in your home directory (copy from /etc/skel/.xim and /etc/skel/.xinitrc if any of these files is missing). If LC_CTYPE is set to something starting with "ja", kinput2 will start automatically when your X session starts and XMODIFIERS will be set correctly as well. If you want to use mainly English and only get the Japanese input working, you can use export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 in your ~/.profile. If you want everything in Japanese, just set export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 in your ~/.profile. You can also make these settings global for your system by editing RC_LANG and RC_LC_CTYPE in /etc/sysconfig/language and run SuSEconfig. RC_LANG and RC_LC_CTYPE from /etc/sysconfig/language give the initial values for LANG and LC_CTYPE for all users who don't override this in their personal profiles like ~/.profile.
There must be some kind of keystroke combination that will do this, right?
Shift + Space.
But it is not documented anywhere.
http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/kinput2.html
Also, I have heard of something called kterm which is like an xterm but can display Japanese chars, but this seems very hard to find anywhere.
It's included on the SuSE Linux 8.1 CDs. Just install it with YaST2 if you like. But kterm is a very old fork of xterm. Development of kterm has stopped years ago. And kterm doesn't support UTF-8, it only supports legacy encodings like EUC-JP. Better use mlterm, xiterm or xterm instead. mlterm and xiterm support many encodings including UTF-8. xterm supports only ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 but supports many other encodings with the help of luit (see the man page of luit).
Any suggestions would be welcome.
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Mike Fabian