Internationalisation
Hello list
I'm trying to set up multi-lingual capability on a new-installed Debian
Stretch machine, I can't get Japanese input to work and I am starting to
think I am doing (or failing to do) something enormously stupid.
I've installed stretch on an "Affinity" mini-PC purchased in Japan,
where I live. Yesterday I updated everything to latest available. It's a
Core i3 if I remember right with 2GB of RAM and 64GB SSD. I've decided
to give this to my 12-year-old son who has recently started showing an
interest in learning to program for iOS and Android devices. I thought
we'd get started on Android and see how he goes, then start thinking
about setting up a VM environment for him to do iOS development if his
interest sticks. Although I'm traditionally a Gnome user I've installed
KDE on this machine as I originally intended this machine as an
experiment to see what other DEs were like these days before I got the
idea to use it for this purpose.
Now the last thing on earth I'd ever want is a computer trying to
communicate with me, or expecting me to communicate with it, in
Japanese. But my son, being half-Japanese, sees the world, and more to
the point the computer screen, through different eyes -- younger,
fresher, less myopic, and most importantly rather keener to read
Japanese.
I've created an account for him (and another for his eight-year-old
brother, to keep sibling rivalry out of it) on the machine. I've read
the instructions on the Debian Wiki[1] although I suspect these are
somewhat old and they are a not-great translation from the Japanese
page, I think. They basically cover a bunch of packages that need to be
installed, all of which I installed except the supposedly KDE-specific
one which does not exist. Instead I found kde-l10n-ja, which I
installed. I also picked ibus-anthy for input as I have used that
successfully in Gnome (although I don't remember well how I did it, I
don't recall it being a major struggle).
A terminal launched from inside KDE shows my LANG env variable set to
en_GB.UTF8, which is what I chose at install time, but from looking at
profile and bashrc scripts in /etc and my home dir I cannot for the life
of me figure out how that is getting set, except it is
in /etc/default/locale. I assume some part of KDE is reading that and
setting LANG accordingly.
The goal I want to get to is to give my son as Japanese an environment
as possible when he logs in, and a fully English environment for me when
I log in. I have this on Windows 8 on my laptop, and if Windows can do
it, obviously Debian can do it better...
After installing the packages recommended by the wiki page[1], and the
additional package mentioned above which may or may not be necessary,
and selecting in KDE System settings the Japanese language when logged
in as my son, and then rebooting, my son can log into a
partially-Japanese-ised environment. The K menu is mostly in Japanese.
LibreOffice is not even though I installed the internationalisation
package mentioned on the wiki for it. Presumably something needs turning
on there. But the biggest problem I have right now is that Japanese
INPUT is not working. I have got Ibus on the task bar and if I right
click it I can see Japanese is selected, but if I try to type in any
window -- a terminal (where error messages are in Japanese), or
LibreOffice Word, etc, it steadfastly types regular alphabet characters
(romaji as the Japanese call them). Can anyone guess what stupid mistake
I have made? I did install the fonts packages recommended on the wiki
page...
As I say I have Japanese input working in Gnome under Jessie on my main
machine, although I don't recall much about how I set it up -- my memory
is I installed a bunch of packages and it just worked. Now I want to get
it working on KDE under stretch. Backing away from KDE and using Gnome
is a last-resort option, but I am not confident I will do any better
there as I don't remember how I got it working before and also I believe
KDE is a little more similar to Windows and will make an easier
transition for my son who has learned Windows at school.
Thanks
Mark
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/JapaneseEnvironmentE
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