THE QUESTION:
>A Japanese user here is keen to use Mule (MUlti Lingual Emacs) on our
>Solaris 2.5.1 environment. Mule itself doesn't look like being hard to
>get going: it's just a slightly hacked emacs 19.28 and I've compiled
>that in the past. The trouble comes when I try to figure out how to
>install Wnn which is required to use Japanese characters in Mule.
>
>The instructions for Wnn say it's an X11R5 system but Solaris 2.5.X is
>X11R6. Since the docs discussing the nitty-gritty are in Japanese I've
>been unable to figure out just what Wnn does anyway. I think I just
>need the jserver part and that sounds like it's a modified Xserver,
>i.e., I'd need to run jserver instead of Xsun which I'm not keen to
>do. If I need to obtain and compile X11R5 then this seems like too
>much work and too many system resources.
>
>How do others edit Japanese text under Solaris? If anyone has Wnn
>working, what advice can you pass on about the best approach? TIA.
THE ANSWERS
It turns out that Solaris 2.5.X is still only X11R5 and not X11R6 as I
thought. Sun seem to be way behind here. Arolovitch Alan pointed out
that Japanese Solaris is available from Sun as a separate product but I
haven't checked out this alternative. Having X11R5 gave me more
confidence in playing with the Wnn configuration and I was able to get
enough of it going to use Japanese with Mule.
It turns out that the only part of Wnn that we needed was the jserver.
This daemon can be started by users but runs setuid wnn (so you need to
set up a wnn account). It communicates with users via a named pipe
(/tmp/jd_sockV4) and apparently provides a translation service between
the Japanese Kana characters entered by the user and Kanji. Mule
(MUlti Lingual Emacs) communicates with the server automatically
provided that it's compiled correctly knowing the location of the Wnn
installation.
I was able to compile Mule without trouble but Wnn gave some problems.
The main difficulty was that I couldn't find out what was supposed to
be going on since I ran into a language barrier as soon as I went
beyond the few English documentation files. The main trick is to
compile the jserver only. I was able to get a working build by
changing only two files from the distribution:
Xsi/Makefile.R5ini
Xsi/configR5/Project.tmpl
Also, it turns out that jserver needs to create a directory for each
user but the install scripts don't set this up. I had to
mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/wnn/ja_JP/dic/usr
and chown the directory to `wnn' to finally get everything working.
THE GLORY
Arolovitch Alan <alan@macs.biu.ac.il>
Casper Dik <casper@holland.Sun.COM>
Glenn Satchell <Glenn.Satchell@uniq.com.au>
-- James Ashton VK1XJA System Administrator http://wwwsyseng.anu.edu.au/~jaa Department of Systems Engineering Voice +61 6 279 8675 Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering FAX +61 6 279 8688 Australian National University Email James.Ashton@anu.edu.au Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
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