[Sunhelp] Japanese Support in Solaris

[Miles Nordin]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Melinda Taylor wrote:

> We am running Solaris 2.6 in our department in AUstralia. We have 
> a new person . . . would like to be able to send and recieve emails 
> in Japanese on our Solaris system.

I cannot help you much with email in particular, but can lead you to
Japanese-capable software in general.  For email, you might look at emacs
and Gnus, as emacs is supposed to have very good i18n support.  But, I am
not sure that it does Japanese.  I know the right version of mh can do
Japanese, but you may need kanji xterm with mh. There are also
kanji-capable xterms (kterm) that may work with ordinary email programs
through a special MIME type that starts a kterm.

The Japanese user community is very active on NetBSD and has added much
Japanese software to their packages collection.  This is good for you for
two reasons:

 o The NetBSD packages collection can supposedly be made to work on
   Solaris.  See the 'zoularis' package.  The Solaris functionality is
   not impeccably documented, and probably isn't as well-maintained as the
   NetBSD functionality.  But, I've heard reports that some have gotten
   very useful performance out of it.  You might thus try to use the
   packages directly, such that you could just type 'make install' and
   have a free software package (and all the libraries it depends upon)
   downloaded, compiled, installed.  Because it's a package system, later
   you can deinstall or upgrade things.  This might make much of your 
   sysadmining easier in general, while also satisfying the goal of
   getting you access to Japanese-capable free software.

 o With far less work, you can find URL's to Japanese-i18n'd software in
   the package collection's human-readable Makefile's.  You may also find
   Japanese patches to ordinary programs in the 'patches' directory.  Some
   of these patches are available only in the NetBSD packages collection,
   but mostly the collection can serve as a copious and well-varified
   page-o'-links.  It's always the first place to turn when I want the URL
   for a well-known OSS project.

In the old days, all Japanese packages went into the 'japanese' package
category.  Now, however, i18n in general and Japanese developers in
particular have become so important that it is ridiculous if not
disrespectful to segregate the packages, and NetBSD is trying to merge
Japanese support into all packages while eliminating the redundant
versions in the 'japanese' category.  So, look for Japanese-i18n'd stuff
in the 'japanese' category first.  Then, look through the Makefiles and
patches of ordinary programs to see if someone has added Japanese support.

There are two ways to browse the collection.  You can browse the html
index-tree that the packages system makes to help you find which package
you want:

  ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/README.html

You can browse the collection's source code via cvsweb, and thus get a
much more intimate feel for how NetBSD changed ordinary programs to
Japanify them:

  http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/pkgsrc/

-- 
Miles Nordin / +1 720 841-8308