After two years of running Lucid Puppy 525 I've finally gotten round to building my first Precise Puppy (561). It looks very smart. I'm almost disconcerted.
But after the basic set-up and tweaking for personal preferences I came to the issue which caused me more problems than any other when I was a newbie struggling with lupu 520/525.
Could I get a Japanese IME up and running on Precise Puppy 561? Fortunately the answer was yes. It's easy once you know how. A couple of sessions with a well known search engine provided me with the name of the file needed and a location where it could be downloaded.
The Japanese language pack for Precise Puppy is
lang_pack_ja-1.5b.sfs and it's available
here.
But it's not available in the official ibiblio repository. I wonder why? This latest language pack is a good. I works 'out of the box'. Install the sfs, tweak the SCIM settings for your personal preferences (it will work on defaults), reboot Puppy and start typing.
New versions of the Japanese language pack are announced at the
japanese forum but (unless I'm even worse at searching this form than I already think I am) they don't seem to be announced here. By making this post I bumping this thread for the first time in two years.
It seems to me that the support Puppy Linux offers to people who need to type in non-latin languages is fragmented. Each language seems to be approached on an ad hoc basis. The issues of 'non-latin input' and 'localisation' appear to have been jumbled together.
I am an English speaker. I don't need anything localised. But I do, on occasions, want to type nihongo script into my PC.
When I look at the official repository I don't see a pet for SCIM. Nor do see pets for the major non-latin scripts (anthy, hangul, pinyin, tamil, hindi etc.).
SCIM isn't particulary large. I would happy to see SCIM included as a standard component of Puppy. Then it would be up to the user to simply add in whatever scripts they need. That way adding support for non-latin input would be divorced from the issue of localisation.
Shinobar-san, if you happen to read this post, I have a question: While looking at your repository I noticed that four days after you first posted the current ja-1.5b language pack you added a pet called
lang_pack_ja-precise-fix-20120516.pet. The question is 'what is being fixed and who needs to install this'?