Adding Japanese to Linux

[mecpaw]

More specificly Debian 4.0 and rTorrent. After reading the rather effective tutorial "Installing Japanese games", I have got Japananese characters to properly display in Win XP. Normally having wierd characters in Linux poses no problmes but sometimes it does(like on a recent torrent I can't even ftp into the folder). I would be nice to have Japanese characters display properly. Any hints?

Thanks.

 

[rikijpn]

linux

Glad to see there are other Linux users here^^.
Yeah it's kind of complex when Japanese named files are involved... Because there are so many ways character encodings they can have. Especially Japanese named torrents with a chinese encoding (obviously from users that aren't well familiarized with text encoding...) can be hell.

If you can't read file names on your browser, then you probably just need the x-fonts for Japanese.

sudo apt-cache search font japanese

(or just use synaptic) Will give you a list of useful font you may want to download. Get some true type fonts too (the ones that start with ttf-).
And get "nkf" (sudo apt-get install nkf) to help decoding to your locale different encoded text... I assume you are using unicode(utf-8) as your default locale. When file names are encoded in ShiftJis for example, you can cd where it is, and then do "ls|nkf" to be able to read it. But you just better change its name to ro-maji just to save you the trouble.

It depends on what torrent client and locale you are using, but probably utf-8 would be the best encoding to use when downloading torrents. On Ktorrent you can choose freely which encoding to use. Sometimes when the encoding is not allowed some files/dirs will not show... but at least when using utf-8 you will see some weird characters as a replacement.

 

[scarletsnow]

There is a Japanese version of Slax on sourceforge.jp.

 

[rikijpn]

of course^^

There is a Japanese version of Slax on sourceforge.jp.

There has to be a Japanese "version" (it just means its locale is on Japanese language, nothing changes besides that) of pretty much all the most popular Linux distros, including Debian of course^^.
You'll still have encoding problems from time to time, being that even on a Japanese locale you'll have to choose between EUCJP, SHIFTJIS, and plain UTF-8. So whenever you find a file named in another encoding you probably won't be able to read it right. But that's not only on Linux but on every OS.

The "Japanese version" as you call it, just means the programs' text and man pages will be shown in Japanese too. But as I say, that's just made by telling locale-gen to generate the chosen locales, so next time you restart X you can choose to login in any language you want. You can just add the locale from your "English version" without problem and takes like less 5 mins.

 

[scarletsnow]

The Japanese version of Slax includes the package japanese.lzm. It adds Japanese fonts, Japanese input method, sets the keyboard to a Japanese one and such.

 

[rikijpn]

different distros

The Japanese version of Slax includes the package japanese.lzm. It adds Japanese fonts, Japanese input method, sets the keyboard to a Japanese one and such.

In Debian you can do all that from the installation menu of any "language" version. Well pretty much any of those operations can be done after installing any linux distro I think.
There is no problem with trying/using other distros. But being that OP is using Debian... This is getting out of topic.