> I am a SuSE 7.1 user in America.
> I wanted to get Japanese fonts, and Japanese input working under
> SuSE 7.1, so I got on the web and searched for an answer.
> 
> I found someone who told me that if I emailed you, you would send me
> a CD that would allow me to do Japanese Input?  

A regular SuSE 7.2 box, even the one sold in the USA should contain
basic support for Japanese. If Japanese is used during the
installation, Japanese input should work out of the box. 

> Is that information correct?  If not, could you tell me how I can
> get Japanese fonts working under SuSE 7.1? 

Information about how to get Japanese input going is in the suse-cjk
document on my home page:

  http://www.suse.de/~mfabian/suse-cjk/suse-cjk.html

See the section on XIM.

Basically you need to install:

    canna.rpm
    kinput2.rpm
    xfntjp.rpm
    kterm.rpm

You'll find these rpms here for SuSE 7.1 and 7.2:

    ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/7.1/suse/
    ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/7.2/suse/ 

(in the subdirectories j1 or j2).

After installing these rpms, run SuSEconfig and start the cannaserver:

    ~$ rccanna start

(You have to do this as root. This will be done automatically
during booting, when START_CANNA=yes in /etc/rc.config).

Make sure you have ~/.xim in your home directory. ~/.xim is a script,
which starts an appropriate input server, depending on the value
of LC_CTYPE. ~/.xim is sourced from ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession.
Usually, you already have the default versions of these three files
in the home directories of each user because they are copied there
from /etc/skel when a new user accound is created. If these files
are missing, copy them from /etc/skel/ to you home directory.

Start your X11 session in Japanese:

    ~$ LANG=ja_JP LC_CTYPE=ja_JP startx

Now kinput2 should be running and can be used. For a short
introduction on how to use it, see the section "kinput2 and Canna" in
the suse-cjk document.



ctually there is no real difference between a Japanese version of
SuSE and an English version, we have only one international version
which can do both. The problem is only that we have far too many
packages to be able to put all available packages on the seven CDs
which are in a SuSE professional box. Many of the Japanese packages
are huge, therefore we have to omit most Japanese packages from an
English or German 7.2 Professional box. This is only to save space on
the CDs, the Japanese packages are fully compatible to the packages
contained in an English or German 7.2 Professional box and work
without problems. You can easily add the Japanese packages, there are
no special modifications necessary.

The ftp version at ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/7.2/suse/ contains
almost all packages available, but we could not put all that on only 7
CDs. The SuSE 7.2 Personal edition doesn't contain any Japanese
packages at all, it had only 3 CDs and therefore space was even more
limited.

Of course we can do special CDs which contain more Japanese packages
and omit some other packages instead. The SuSE Linux 7.1-Japanese
ISO images, which are available via ftp are like that, they contain
extra Japanese packages and omit some other packages (which are not
very important in my opinion, i.e. you probably won't miss them).

In case of SuSE Linux 7.2, we didn't yet create special Japanese ISO
images. Maybe we will create SuSE Linux 7.2-Japanese images soon, but
that isn't completely decided yet.

But I believe this is not so important for you, because a regular,
English SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional box already contains a small,
basic set of Japanese packages which may already be enough for your
needs. And if not, you can easily download the missing packages from
the ftp version and add them.

 speak and read Japanese fairly well,

Then I recommend to do the installation in Japanese, if you plan to do
a fresh install. If SuSE 7.2 is installed in Japanese, the basic
Japanese packages will be installed automatically and default values
for the system language in /etc/rc.config will be set automatically
to Japanese. Like this:

    DEFAULT_LANGUAGE="japanese"
    RC_LANG="ja_JP"

Of course you can achieve the same effect by adding the Japanese
packages later and changing the system language variables in
/etc/rc.config manually later.

And you don't even need to set the default system language to
Japanese, if only one user on your system prefers Japanese and
the other users prefer English, you can set the system language
to English and add

    export LANG=ja_JP
    export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP

to the file ~/.profile in the home directory of the user who wants to
use Japanese. If this user logs in, bash will read his ~/.profile and
set the language to Japanese, if he starts X11 (using startx) a
Japanese input server will be started automatically.

> I am no expert, but does the
> Japanese SuSE distribution have most of the documentation still available
> in English?

Yes. All man pages, howtos etc. are available in English as well.
Actually, the English versions are usually more complete and more
up to date. Japanese documentation is almost always a translation
of documentation which was originally written in English. Often
the Japanese translation are considerably out of date.

You can easily decide whether you want to read a man page in Japanese
or English using the LANG variable:

   ~$ LANG=ja_JP man man

will show you the Japanese man page of the "man" program whereas

   ~$ LANG=en_US man man

will show you the English version.

Unfortunately the 7.1 prof CDs didn't contain any Japanese packages at
all. I had already created lots of Japanese packages for 7.1 and they
are all available in the ftp version of the 7.1, but I couldn't
convince the people responsible for the CDs that Japanese support is
important, therefore the Japanese packages were omitted from the 7.1
CDs to save space.

With the 7.1 prof CDs you can do the install in Japanese, but that
won't by you anything (apart from that the graphical installer looks
nice in Japanese) because the CDs don't contain any Japanese packages.

For 7.1, you have to download the Japanese packages from the ftp
version and add them later. You can easily do that to your already
installed 7.1 system, there is no need to reinstall.

The 7.1-japanese iso images available on the SuSE ftp server
contain Japanese packages of course and with these iso images you
will get Japanese support out of the box if you do the install
in Japanese. On top of that, the 7.1-japanese iso images contain
some updates compared to the boxed German or English 7.1 prof CDs:

    * the default kernel is 2.2.19 (was 2.2.18 in the German edition, Kernel
2.4.2 is of course also included)
    * KDE 2.1.1 (was 2.0.1 in the German edition)
    * GNOME 1.4.0 (was 1.2.4 in the German edition)
    * some other packages updated, e.g. Mozilla

KDE 2.1.1 works a lot better for Japanese than KDE 2.0.1 did, so
if you like to use KDE it is worth upgrading.

But I don't recommend to download the 7.1-japanese iso images just to
update KDE and get some Japanese package (unless you have infinite
bandwidth). Just downloading updated KDE rpms and special Japanese
rpms separately will give you the same result with much less
downloading.


> Thanks for everything. First I will try downloading the rpms for Japanese
> support, then i will try to download the 7.2 iso's if that doesn't work.

There are no 7.2 iso's available on ftp yet and it is not yet decided
whether there will be any. But the complete 7.2 is already available
as an ftp version.