Krazy Amerikanets wants to toggle between the English and Russian locales on his computer so that he can write in both alphabets. First thing that I did was to run "dpkg-reconfigure locales." I was given three choices of Russian locales:
1. ru_RU ISO-8859-5
2. ru_RU.KOI8 KOI8
3. ru_RU.UTF-8 UTF-8
I believe that KOI8 is the encoding used by Russian Unix users. (And I am aware that Microsoft and Apple have both invented their own, incompatible, encodings.) Should I install the 8859-5 and/or UTF-8 encodings? Please explain why or why not.
The second thing that I did was install the Debian packages xfonts-cyrillic and xfs. (xfs was recommended by xfonts-cyrillic.) Is xfonts-cyrillic used by the russian-speaking people on this forum, or is a different font package recommended?
And slightly off-topic... After dpkg-reconfigure built the KOI8 locale, I rebooted my computer to insure that the new locale became active. Was that necessary? Was the new locale active when dpkg-reconfigure finished? If not, could I have simply "sourced" a configuration file somewhere? /etc/locale.gen perhaps?
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Teaching my Computer to Speak Russian
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sensovision
- Posts: 113
- Joined: 2004-11-15 11:38
- Location: Ukraine
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Hi Harold! I'm from Ukraine but here we still use Russian a lot so I had it on my PC, although I prefer to keep all menus and messages in English and use Rus or Ukr only to chat, mails and documents.
You're right about KOI8-R it's popular amongst *nix users here, but from what I know Debian trying to standartize everything to UTF8. From Russian Debian mailist I've got feeling that UTF8 isn't very popular because some programs still had a problem with it, but if you only need Rus for correspondence I don't see problem in using it.
BTW since most of users I'm corresponding with are working under MS I'm using CP1251 mostly in locales it's called ru_RU (if my memory doesn't fail me).
Anyway I would recommend to generate all Russian locales and as default leave blank locale.
As for xfonts-cyrillic I don't have them so as many oter people here, the reason for this is that they look ugly... I use standart true type fonts xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-75dpi and msttcorfonts (mostly to render sites I'm visiting correctly).
Hope this info would be some of use to you.
You're right about KOI8-R it's popular amongst *nix users here, but from what I know Debian trying to standartize everything to UTF8. From Russian Debian mailist I've got feeling that UTF8 isn't very popular because some programs still had a problem with it, but if you only need Rus for correspondence I don't see problem in using it.
BTW since most of users I'm corresponding with are working under MS I'm using CP1251 mostly in locales it's called ru_RU (if my memory doesn't fail me).
Anyway I would recommend to generate all Russian locales and as default leave blank locale.
As for xfonts-cyrillic I don't have them so as many oter people here, the reason for this is that they look ugly... I use standart true type fonts xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-75dpi and msttcorfonts (mostly to render sites I'm visiting correctly).
Hope this info would be some of use to you.
Denis