Solaris Express General Globalization FAQ

FAQ: General Solaris Express Globalization

• Does this FAQ contains information about globalization in all OpenSolaris community distributions?
• Is my language supported in Solaris Express ? 
• What about variations of the same language?
• I don't see my language in this list. What can I do?
• Yes, I logged in, now tell me how will I input text to an application in my language?
• I logged in, but I can't see my language in the desktop and applications
• I see issues with my language in OpenSolaris. What can I do?
• How will I file an issue I found in the locale I logged into?
• How can I help OpenSolaris with translation issues in my language?
• My application works in one locale. What I need to make sure it works fine on other locales too ?

Does this FAQ contains information about globalization in all OpenSolaris community distributions?

No. This FAQ only contains information about Solaris Express distributions of OpenSolaris, which is Sun's distribution based on OpenSolaris code.

Is my language supported in Solaris Express ? 

The following languages are supported in Solaris Express community distributions of OpenSolaris

Albanian

Arabic

Bengali

Bulgarian

Catalan

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

English

Estonian

Finnish

French

German

Greek

Gujarathi

Gurmukhi

Hebrew

Hindi

Hungarian

Icelandic

Italian

Japanese

Kannada

Korean

Latvian

Lithuanian

Macedonian

Maltese

Malayalam

Norwegian

Norwegian Bokmal

Norwegian Nynorsk

Polish

Portuguese

Romanian

Russian

Serbian

Serbo-Croatian

Simplified Chinese

Slovak

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Tamil

Telugu

Thai

Traditional Chinese

Turkish

Pl. download the Solaris Express community version of OpenSolaris from the following link to install Solaris in your machine to login to any of these languages

See Solaris Express community versions download for downloading a Solaris Express distribution of OpenSolaris.

See for installation instructionsif you plan to install Solaris in a dual boot environment

What about variations of the same language?

Solaris Express support regional variations of languages, in a general sense these are referred to as 'locale's. Here is a more stricter defintion of locale.

You may be able to see a list of languages and associated region names in the login screen when logging in.

We don't support all the combinations, but eventually planning to (and you can help!)

I logged in, but I can't see my language in the desktop and applications

The language you've logged into may lack translation for applications. Pl. see this answer for difference between partially and fully supported locales

I don't see my language in this list. What can I do?

All the supported languages except the following Indian languges

Bengali

Gujarathi

Gurmukhi

Kannada

Malayalam

Tamil

Telugu

are given in the login screen.

Login to Hindi if you're using any of these Indic languages and from there you will be able to access the above Indian languages

A tool for creating language packages from  Unicode CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) will be available in the Solaris Express 09/07 version. This will allow you to create and add your own language packages and install in the system. You can also contribute back the packages such created.

See information about locale creator tool by "/usr/bin/localectr -h" command

Yes, I logged in, tell me how will I input text to an application in my language?

When logging into Solaris Express desktop, choose the Gnome desktop, option. The other choice, CDE desktop., will be obsoleted in future.

In gnome desktop, on the panel, near the speaker icon, we can see a little application names 'Input Method Switcher' docked in. If this is not there, right click on the gnome-panel and select the 'Add to panel' option. THen from the list of applications comes up, select 'Input Method Switcher'.

After we have 'Input Method Switcher' in the panel, right click on it's icon and select 'Preferences' from the menu which comes up. An input method preference editor will come up. There are tabs for the editor like General, Language/Scripts, Trigger keys, Keyboard and Misc. On the Languages/Scripts tab, you can see various available Languages/Scripts in the system. If your language is not on the Languages/Scripts to input pane, use the 'Add' key to add it. The 'Trigger Keys' can be used to control the turning on and turning off the input method.

There may be multiple input methods already configured for the locale you log in. Left click on the panel icon for input method switcher and selecting the relevant input method will enable you to input text in the language of your choice. After selecting an input method, pressing the 'Trigger Key' (Ctrl-Space by default) will enable you to alternate between the selected input method and English.

I see issues with my language in OpenSolaris. What can I do?

Pl. check that the issue is already known by checking the known bugs in the bug search page

You can use the "Text Search:" option in the above bug filing page with the locale name you're logged into.

Get the locale name you're in by running 'locale' command from a terminal

For example

bash-3.00$ locale

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"

LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"

LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"

LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"

LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"

LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8

LC_ALL=

The locale in this example is en_US.UTF-8

If you are curious about what these locale environment variables mean, pl see this document for a description

Input the locale information thus obtained in the "Text Search:" field in bug search page along with other data you have about the bug

See this document for more information about Solaris locales

See the next question about how to file a good globalization bug

How will I file an issue I found in the locale I logged into?

This is OpenSolaris bug filing form

If you see any issue with a specific locale, please consider filing a bug. Following are the main components for correctly filing a bug using the above form

category

subcategory

release

hardware

synopsis

How to find the right category?

Bugs relating to Solaris Express globalization fall in to following main categories

• Bugs in the libraries
  Select the category as 'library' from the pulldown list of categories if the following are true
  • An issue happening in more than one application
  • A font issue

• Bugs in utilities
  Select the category as 'utility' from the pulldown list of categories if the following are true
  • An issue happening in one specific non-gnome application or commmand line utility

• Bugs in other desktop applications
  Select the category "Java Desktop System" for important applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution and select category Gnome for all other gnome applications.

How to find the right sub-category?

• Desktop applications subcegories
  Select the sub-category from
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • Evolution
  • Gnome

• Bugs in translation in other applications, utilities and libraries
  Select the sub-category as 'l10n-messages' if the issue is one of
  • no translation for messages is displayed.
  • incorrect translation for messages.

• Bugs in internationalization applications, utilities and libraries
  Select the sub-category as 'l10n-common' if the issue is one of
  • Not able to input, copy and paste non English text (if text input is supported in application)

How to find the right release?

• Type 'uname -v' in a terminal, the output is the release name

How to find the right hardware?

• Command 'arch' will help you determine the type of the system. Give generic if not sure

How to write the correct synopsis?

• Just write in the abbreviated symptom of the issue in a line

 If need any help, pl. send a mail to i18n-discuss mailing list at opensolaris.org

How can I help with issues in my language?

You can help by contributing translations or trying to fix internationalization issues

This document explains how to help with translations in Gnome applications

This document explains how to help with translations in Solaris ON (OS/Net) components

 If you want to fix any i18n issues, pl. send a mail to i18n-discuss mailing list at opensolaris.org somebody will happy to get you upto speed about what to do

My application works on one locale. How I can make sure it works on another locales too ?

If your application is coded in a Code Set Independent way, it should be able to handle any codeset. It's always a good idea to test the application in the target locales to make sure your application works fine in those locales. We can try to run the test cases for application in other target locales after adapting the test cases from the working locale to the target locale

 There are generally 2 kinds of testing, the application messages translation testing in the new locale and application functionality testing in new locale

 If the applications message interface is fine in Japanese and not in Korean, then the issue will be in Korean message files. Wrong translations cause incorrect messages, no translation causes the interface to display using the built in messages in the application.

This document helps with translations in Gnome applications

This document helps with translations in Solaris ON (OS/Net) components

 As an example of functional testing., if my app behaves well in ja_JP.UTF-8 locale, and I would like to see how it works for ja_JP.eucJP locale, convert the test input to eucJP encoding and run the tests for in ja_JP.eucJP locale. In the case of UTF-8 locales, we will be able to convert the test input used to any other encoding provided we cover the same language. So convert the input from utf-8 to eucJP like this

 iconv -f utf-8 -t eucJP utf-8_file > eucJP_file

then use that as the input test case for application running in UTF-8 locale.

In cases where a different language is involved new test inputs and/or test cases needs to be created

In case your app does not behave well in a locale, you need to examine the source code for incorrect API usage and will have to replace or augment the API calls with the right CodeSet Indepent API's. Depending on the application complexity, the language used for coding and the libraries available the extend of this effort will vary...

Happy hacking!