potato info

[Alan DuBoff]

Tor Slettnes wrote:

> What is 'dbcs'?

Double Byte Character Set (DBCS), english machines use (Single Byte Character
Set) SBCS. There are a lot of countries that use DBCS, Japan, China, Korea,
etc...

>I hope you are not thinking of 'jdbc' (java database connectivity)?

I hope not either!<G>

Actually, I did find out that Debian has pretty good support for Japanese
localization. It is all add-ons that you can put on the SBCS version, which
incorporates an IME (Input Method). You need the IME to be able to select the
characters from the library, so essentially they have 3 ways to input the
words with phonetics (Katakana, Hirigana, and Romagi which is our Arabic type
characters), and then you select the Kanji (Chinese characters) you want to
use. Often there will be 7 or 8 Kanjis for a word, since they have the same
pronounciation, but different meaning. I can read Katakana and Hirigana but
only know about 300 Kanji. All foriegn anything in Japan uses Katakana,
including people's names and any word for something that came from outside of
Japan, so if you know only to read Katakana you can get by half ass. Hirigana
is taught to the children as their first characters, and hence, the signs at
the train stations and often some menus and stuff like that will have some
Hirigana.

If you use a standard 101 keyboard, typically Alt-~ will flip between the
phonetic types, where a Japanese 106 keyboard has extra keys on it to handle
that. I did buy my wife a 106 keyboard a couple years ago, but she hasn't been
using it, since the machine has multiple boots on it (for me and my son).

My wife is not real computer literate, so I've been holding off trying to
install Linux for her, but since she only uses Communicator to send email to
her friends, I'm going to try.

-- 

Alan DuBoff - Conductor
Software Orchestration, Inc.
aland@SoftOrchestra.com