I’ve only spent any real time with Ubuntu ( mepis.org/ ). Was using Ubuntu as mostly a server computer and Mepis as my desktop.
I haven’t booted into Linux for the longest time and I couldn’t remember why I stopped (until last night). I was loving things until I had trouble figuring out how to get Pinyin input working on Mepis.
Mepis is Debian based, so if there’s an easy way to do it that I somehow overlooked, that’d work too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t mind trying out a version of Linux that’s “Chinese Friendly” out of the box.
I think I remember someone saying Fedora was pretty Chinese friendly out of the box. Or if getting Chinese to work in Ubuntu is easy, maybe I’d switch to using that as my desktop OS.
The *nix bug is biting me again, time to do something different…
Fedora Core 4 is great for chinese out of the box.
Install it as one of your options during initial setup and on the login sreen there is a languange button, just click chinese and your system will come up as chinese. Cntl-Space brings up the IME and cntl-shift toggles between input modes.Pinyin is the 4th option.
The story behind that one is that just after the Microsoft “NSA_KEY” headlines in 2000, mainland China announced that they’d be putting that together because control of operating system source code (and hence security) is the “two bombs and a satellite” of the modern age, i.e., as essential to national security as nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and intelligence-gathering capabilities.
That said, when I mentioned Red Flag last year, someone else posted that it was of very poor quality. Plus there’s the question of whether the CCP has subverted the software in the distro for their own nefarious purposes.
SuSE 10.0 seems to work well also. Very polished in usung both Gnome or KDE. However, getting the multimedia functions working on this distro is quite a pain.
ubuntu really is my favorite distro and, now i have wifi enabled, the windows partition is getting dusty with lack of use. i haven’t tried it myself but it has apparently good support for chinese. there’s a thread about setting it up here: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25412&page=2
I wanted to check out Umbutu and Kumbutu. I downloaded both ISO of the DVD and some CDs and couldnt get it to work. For some reason it tells me that my copies are corrupted, even though the mdsums check out. I was pretty careful about burning them. Perhaps its some setting on my Benq DVD. Still waiting for the free cds to arrive in the mail.
that’s a shame. imho, i think ubuntu really is becoming the linux that’s ready for the desktop. i’d really recomend giving it another go. i’d suggest posting to the ubuntu forum - someone there should be able to help.
[quote=“bobl”]Fedora Core 4 is great for chinese out of the box.
Install it as one of your options during initial setup and on the login sreen there is a languange button, just click chinese and your system will come up as chinese. Cntl-Space brings up the IME and cntl-shift toggles between input modes.Pinyin is the 4th option.[/quote]
Hmmm… I’ve just installed Fedora Core 6, but only chose English during installation. I then added Chinese support with Add/remove packages. It all seems to be there, but I’ve got no Chinese support whatsoever. If I change the language to Chinese, it just comes up squares instead of Chinese characters, and Firefox just displays the same squares. Anything I should be looking for?
openSUSE 10.2 works great for me for Chinese support. (fast Taiwan mirror here) I have an all English desktop for me and an all Chinese desktop for my gf on the same computer. Scim (+skim for KDE) is a breeze to set up. Multimedia is pretty easy as well if you add some repositories from hereand an easy script from here. If you choose Chinese in the setup, it will give you all the fonts you need, but if you search around on the DVD, there are more available.
In addition you might consider installing a nice dictionary called Stardict. Various Chinese dictionaries from here. It’s got a nice little mouseover translation function similar to Dr. Eye. (but not quite as great)