MIT provides for its community a powerful computing environment: Athena.
As a non-native speaker of English, sometimes I still feel it necessary to use Chinese characters -- to read mails (and reply), to surf the internet with a browser (or hang around the BBS), or to take notes -- when I use Athena.
Unfortunately, most Athena workstations, which use either Red Hat Linux or Sun OS (Solaris), have (by default) poor support for the use of Chinese characters. None of them provides a easy-to-use tool to setup an environment that enables the display and input of Chinese words.
As I myself am a novice of Linux, it is not easy for me to have a deep insight of this problem. Therefore I began to search a solution from the internet. I found a few potential tricks, then I tried them. Some of them work! Here is a brief summary:
- Most Athena workstations have a built-in Chinese font which has a limited supports of the GB2312 character set. Some programs (e.g. Mozilla) can make use of this font. But GB2312 is somewhat outdated, since many commonly used characters are missing in this national standard, which was firstly accepted in the year of 1980.
- The one editor, GNU Emacs with MULE (Multilingual Environment) can be config to provide a primitive (but good enough!) way to view and input Chinese characters.
- By installing new fonts and do some configurations, we will be able to use the GBK (or even GB18030) character set, both in console and in X environment.
- We can install a Chinese input method for Linux, such as fcitx, which works as good as, if not better than, the UNISPY (ZiGuang PinYin) in MS Windows.