I’ve used Japanese text input since RHEL 3, and Fedora 11 makes multilingual text input even easier. This article describes how to set up Japanese text input with the latest Fedora.
Japanese test display works by default. The new fonts in Fedora 11 are beautiful. If a Japanese language web site does not display properly in Firefox, try adjusting the encoding with View > Character Encoding > Japanese(Shift_JIS) or View > Character Encoding > Japanese(EUC-JP).
For information on how to install Japanese language input on other Linux distributions and other Fedora versions, see Scott Robbins’ authoritative guide, Inputting Japanese text in Linux and some BSDs. I have invited Scott to add this text to his guide when he gets the chance.
Installing the Input Method
Start by installing Japanese input method packages:
yum install scim-lang-japanese
Then, set up your preferences with System > Preferences > Input Method. This will bring up the IM Chooser dialog. You can use either the IBus or SCIM input methods:
- If you Use IBus, click on Input Method Preferences, and choose the Input Methods tab. From the Select an input method list, choose Japanese, and any other languages you want to input. Use the Up and Down buttons to arrange the order in which they appear when you hit the Alt+Shift_L hot key. I also added Chinese-Pinyin, and it works great. At last I can directly type in Chinese how good IBus is, 非常好, instead of entering how much I like it in Japanese, 非常に好きです, and then editing it into Chinese.
- If you Use SCIM, The Input Method Preferences are already set up for Japanese
You may need to log out and log in to see the changes. Now, whenever you hit Ctrl+Space, a small window will appear in the lower right corner of your display. Type something in Japanese. Hit Ctrl+Space once more, and you are typing in English again.
Changing Your User Language
If you really want to go native, add the following to the .bash_profile file in your home directory:
export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
Log out and log in again, and everything is in Japanese.
Don’t try this at home unless you can actually read Japanese. In particular, you will be asked if you want to change your file names to Japanese. Give the wrong answer, and your Desktop/ directory will be renamed デスクトップ/. Are you already staring at the dialog that is threatening to do this? Select 古い名前のままにする(K) to keep your current file names.
Changing the Locale
The locale is a big subject, but the most useful setting I have found is the LC_CTYPE environment variable, because it changes the formatting of dates and currency values in OpenOffice. This may be useful if you live in Japan, but prefer to use Linux in English. In the .bash_profile file in your home directory, add the following :
export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8
Log out and log in again, and everything is in English, assuming LANG is no longer set to ja_JP.UTF-8. Open a spreadsheet with Applications > Office > OpenOffice.org Calc. Choose Format > Cells, choose the Numbers tab, and you can see that the Language has changed to Japanese, and the choices for date and currency formats are those customary in Japan.
gwaei Japanese-English Dictionary
Now that you can type both Japanese and English, you will want a dictionary. The gwaei Japanese-English dictionary for Linux works great with Fedora 11.
Note that the gwaei i386 RPM will not work with x86_64 Fedora 11. If you installed the x86_64 version of Fedora 11, just compile gwaei as explained in the installation instructions.