Hi
I would like to compare current "mainstrwam distros" in Israel (Is it
enough to consider debian, mandrake, redhat, slackware and suse?) Anyway,
I mostly know Mandrake)with respect to hebrew support.
I would like to describe how some of mandake's features, and would like to
know if there are any equivalents
1. locale settings
Mandrake come with precompiles locales in many seperate packages. Setting
of LANG, LC_CTYPE, and others are set up by the installer or a psecial
configuration program. Alternatively you can edit a per-system of per-user
config file (which is applicable for all the shells, including tcsh).
Problems: (1) the format of /etc/sysconfig/i18n is not documented, (2) The
setup program needlessly sets up LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, LC_NUMERIC,
LC_TIME, etc.
2. font settings
Mandrake has a utility called 'fontdrak' to configure fonts for the X
fonts server. fontdrak can import fonts from a windows partition. It is
also suppose to do some sanity checks to fonts it imports.
However it uses the concept of one big fonts directory. If so want to do
some nice manippulations with the font path, go elsewhere.
Another problem is that it does not allow too many operations from the
console.
Other than that you still have 'chkfontpath' and 'ttmkfdir', and of
course, you can edit the FontPath in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
3. Available packages: qt>==2.3, glibc 2.2 . Other than that: lyx, fribidi
(for the command-line filter), acon (although I believe that it is
broken), tetex-latex-{heb|arab} vim6, gtk2 pre-release.
Note that QA is not their greatest side. I believe that acon is known to
be broken for quite some time (but last time I checked, I didn't see this
reflected in the documentation of the package), and tetex-latex-heb was
broken in Mandrake 8.0, and this was only discovered in the beta cycle of
Mandrake 8.1. I figure that people (including me) don't use mandrake's
bugs database.
4. keyboard settings
As of XFree 4.0.3 everything that is needed to set up hebrew keyboard is
was checked into XFree. Any distro that carries tis version of XFree or
later make keyboard settings much easier.
Mandrake's keyboard setup program also sets the keyboard "language" (both
for the console and X). However it currently does not let you play with
the options (e.g: group modifiers: how to switch between hebrew and
english). Setting a "tripple" layout: english+hebrew+another language is
also a difficult task.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
