Japanese On The Included Os?

[zazen666]

Hello,

First post here-I read thru the wiki's and did a search and didn't run across an answer.

How hard/easy will it be to get Japanese language up and running with the included OS?

One of the things I am really looking forward to (hopefully) using my pandora is to study Japanese using ANKI study software, Rikaichan firefox plug in, and of course inputting and reading sites in Japanese.

I am no linux master by far although I did get Japanese runing on ubuntu a few years ago when I had it. I dont want to mess with switiching over the OS that is included with the Pandora cause it looks pretty user friendly.

Thanks

 

[sehs33]

And since we are talking about non-latin originated languages, what about Arabic? I don't care about the UI being in Arabic, but I hope Arabic websites encoded in Unicode + subtitles will work great...

 

[S-r-ex]

I'd like to know this too. I'm going to Japan in ferbruary, and I wil at least need to learn a few phrases in both written as well as spoken in this moonspeak.

 

[droneb]

then make it all non standard single byte languages question

i would require japanese, chinese (simpl and trad).
more than the ui being that way, but input methods for it
IME pinyin or even handwritting on the screen like a tablet would be still good

 

[zhasha]

In linux it's been standard for a long time to use UTF-8 for everything. It will most certainly be capable of displaying characters from all languages, but whether or not the fonts are included I can't tell. In any case, it's nowhere near as horrible and tragic as Windows unicode support. Worst case scenario you have to manually point and click install a couple of fonts. Some applications may not support UTF-8, but that only happens when the creator was too stubborn to use a toolkit like Gtk+ or Qt.
tl;dr: yes, it'll work, and it'll be easy.

As for handwriting, take a look at cellwriter. It supports any character you can throw at it.
For IMEs, look at IBus. It has Anthy for Japanese, Chewing/PinYin for Chinese and a truckload of other backends for other exotic languages

 

[Gilrad]

You're in luck so long as there is a linux-savvy person out there willing to set things up for those of us who aren't so capable:

It runs linux, so the linux-based Japanese input method (anthy iirc) will be available, and as I remember, there was a build for gjiten (an excellent japanese dictionary program) on ubuntu ARM, so that should also be available.

So I guess there's two questions here:
Does Angstrom ARM have anthy in its repositories already? (I can't imagine why not),
and
Is it a trivial matter to take a simple program built for Ubuntu ARM and recompile it for angstrom? That's also assuming it doesn't exist on the angstrom arm repository.

edit--Looks like there is a version for armv7a, is that the same ARM as the cortex A8?

But gjiten isn't on the repository list... So I am still wondering, is it possible to simply recompile the ARM version for ubuntu for angstrom, or is this a bit more of an involved task?

 

[WizardStan]

Anthy isn't in the repository for my Beagleboard, but it does have an openembedded recipe, making it basically trivial to build and install.
gjiten, however, isn't in the repository or openembedded. Looks like it's specifically using Gnome libraries (according to the wiki entry) so it may not work with any other desktop (which would explain its absence from the repository and recipe list)

 

[Pleng]

In any case, it's nowhere near as horrible and tragic as Windows unicode support.

lol I love these 'Linux people' comments. I remember years ago installing some Thai fonts on my Windows ME system and being able to use them straight off. When I moved to XP I didn't even need to install 3rd Party fonts; I just needed to select Thai as a language option at install (or, indeed, at any point after installation). From that point I was able to use Thaiscript (well, the 7 words I actually KNEW, at least) in anything from notepad to excel to firefox.

At the around the same time as installing XP I tried both SUsE and another distro (Red Hat, or Mandrake I believe) and at the time neither of them supported Thai as an input language at installation.

I'm pretty sure that this many years down the line there most probably is support for said language in Linux distros, but please enlighten me as to what the issue is with Windows unicode support.

 

[zhasha]

In any case, it's nowhere near as horrible and tragic as Windows unicode support.

lol I love these 'Linux people' comments. I remember years ago installing some Thai fonts on my Windows ME system and being able to use them straight off. When I moved to XP I didn't even need to install 3rd Party fonts; I just needed to select Thai as a language option at install (or, indeed, at any point after installation). From that point I was able to use Thaiscript (well, the 7 words I actually KNEW, at least) in anything from notepad to excel to firefox.

At the around the same time as installing XP I tried both SUsE and another distro (Red Hat, or Mandrake I believe) and at the time neither of them supported Thai as an input language at installation.

I'm pretty sure that this many years down the line there most probably is support for said language in Linux distros, but please enlighten me as to what the issue is with Windows unicode support.

I love it when Windows people assume that just because Windows can display fonts sometimes, it supports unicode. Try taking a PC set up for en_US and plug in a harddisk set up for ja_JP. O'er the horror of everything being completely mangled and unreadable. Most MS applications compensate for this retardedness by using hueg tables (like the ones you'll find in SDL for Windows compatibility) to convert everything to UTF-8. There's also the problem of when I for example have files with japanese names on my english harddisk (when it actually works), that only half my applications can open the file. WMP for example refused to play a song I had until I renamed it to something with IBM Extended ASCII. Then there's the general retardedness of everything being in ISO-8859-1 encoding which causes pain and horror when it comes to portability.
You'll also find that in guides for writing portable applications such as the Gtk+/Glib guide, they tell you all about the general shittyness of MS unicode support.
.NET masks it fairly well as I understand it, but that doesn't account for the entire system being built around code pages... that's right... code pages. MS even still has KB articles related to their own code pages... it makes me sad...

 

[renwils]

There's a version of scim compiled for arm in the debian repositories, so it's certainly possible.

 

[Pleng]

I love it when Windows people assume that just because Windows can display fonts sometimes, it supports unicode. Try taking a PC set up for en_US and plug in a harddisk set up for ja_JP. O'er the horror of everything being completely mangled and unreadable. Most MS applications compensate for this retardedness by using hueg tables (like the ones you'll find in SDL for Windows compatibility) to convert everything to UTF-8. There's also the problem of when I for example have files with japanese names on my english harddisk (when it actually works), that only half my applications can open the file. WMP for example refused to play a song I had until I renamed it to something with IBM Extended ASCII.

OK Points taken with regards to file names. I have seen similar issues in the past (though I haven't used WMP since it switched to the horrible 'library' structure in, what, version 7?) I haven't tried any such files in Windows 7, however, so I have no idea if the problem still exists.

However I have no experience of how Linux handles the same issues so it's difficult for me to comment.

 

[zhasha]

However I have no experience of how Linux handles the same issues so it's difficult for me to comment.

On linux, this is a non-issue. Linux doesn't care what locale you're in. It only cares about the string of bytes representing the file name.

 

[zazen666]

Thanks for replies everyone,

So, what I am reading here is that it is certainly possible, but not supported right out of the box?(in other words, not in the reps or one click away?) It will take a little fooling around to get it to work, either by myself-or requesting someone to add it?

Thank you

 

[lulzfish]

Thanks for replies everyone,

So, what I am reading here is that it is certainly possible, but not supported right out of the box?(in other words, not in the reps or one click away?) It will take a little fooling around to get it to work, either by myself-or requesting someone to add it?

Thank you

You might need to go in the repositories and install a fonts package, so that should be a few GUI clicks and a short download.
(From what I'm hearing. I don't know much about Linux fonts / internationality, but I've never had a problem with it)

 

[droneb]

OK, but no one has talked about input methods,

 

[zhasha]

OK, but no one has talked about input methods,

see

For IMEs, look at IBus. It has Anthy for Japanese, Chewing/PinYin for Chinese and a truckload of other backends for other exotic languages