mepis chinese howto

I guess there are a lot of people out there who'd love to have their SimplyMEPIS display and input Chinese. I'm one of them and this is my experience setting up Simplified Chinese support. This is adapted from Debian HK's "Make your Debian Sid support Chinese".

(Traditional Chinese can display, but the fonts look incomplete, some characters don't display at all. Anyone can help here? )

System info: SimplyMEPIS 2004.04 fresh install with kernel 2.6.7.

Everything has to be done as root.

Assuming you've already set up /etc/sources.list and done a apt-get update from kpackage,

1. Fire up kpackage to retrieve and install the following packages:
Quote:

a. fcitx - a very small, easy to use X input method server, similar to MS IME
b. xfonts-intl-chinese - fonts needed by fcitx
c. ttf-arphic-bkai00mp - Arphic free traditional chinese KaitiM fonts
d. ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp - Arphic free traditional chinese Mingti2L fonts
e. ttf-arphic-gkai00mp - Arphic free simplified chinese KaitiM fonts
f. ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp - Arphic free simplified chinese SungtiL fonts



2. Add the following line in /etc/locale.gen:
Quote:

en_US ISO-8859-1
zh_TW BIG5
zh_CN GB2312



3. Then run locale-gen.
Quote:

# locale-gen
Generating locales...
en_US.ISO-8859-1... done
zh_CN.GB2312... doen
zh_TW.BIG5... done
Generation complete.
#



4. Confirm the following locale name is showed after typing locale -a:
Quote:

C
POSIX
en_US
en_US.iso88591
zh_CN
zh_CN.gb2312
zh_TW
zh_TW.big5



5. In /etc/X11/Xsession.d directory, create a new file named 95xim with following content:
Quote:

export LANG="zh_CN.GB2312"
export LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.GB2312"
export LC_ALL="zh_CN.GB2312"

# fcitx will start in background by default
/usr/bin/fcitx
XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"

export XMODIFIERS


(If you want to use Big5 encoding to view Traditional Chinese, replace all the "zh_CN.GB2312" in the file with "zh_TW.Big5". But it didn't look good on my system.)

6. Logout and then log in again to have the X server read the 95xim file. Fcitx should load at at the same time as the startup splash screen is displayed. It is a small toolbar at the top edge of the screen.

7. Press Ctrl+space in any input field or text editor to display the input bar. Then pinyin method can be used. To switch input method, click the pinyin button (1st button from right) on the main fcitx toolbar until it changes to the desired input method.

8. Done! Simplified Chinese will now display and input correctly.