Internationalization/Russification of CKM Linux cluster

Notes for users

1. Declare your language
2. Displaying russian characters in xterm/Eterm/gnome-terminal etc.
3. Entering russian characters from keyboard
4. Setting up XEmacs
5. Printing ascii files with a2ps
6. Reading/Sending/Printing mails
7. Russian in TEX

Declare your language

In principle the only thing you need to do is to set environment variable LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R . After that all "clever" application should russify themselves. They will show russian menus and so on. One of the question is when/where to set this variable:

• Globalistic You want every user on this computer to be russified. Then put LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R in /etc/environment
• Large You are rare russian speaking user on the computer. And you want all your application to speak russian as much as possible. Then put LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R in your .xsession file
• Command line you may want to put LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R in your ~/.bash_profile file. Then only applications that are launched from command line are russified. The rest speak english. There is an annoyance that Xterm/Eterm/gnome-term that you start from gnome menu for example Do Not speak russian. There is a trick described in the next bullet.
• Moderate You want specific applications to understand russian, and the rest to speak english. Then you should use following commands (in aliases for example) LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R; Eterm --font 8x13-cyrillic This is a useful trick to create an icons on gnome panel which will launch "Russian Eterm" which is ready to speak russian in otherwise english environment.

Do not declare your locales

Do not set environment variable LC_* Setting up LANG should be enough.

Displaying russian characters in xterm/Eterm/gnome-terminal etc.

I recommend using command line options. You can use ~/.Xresources and other tricks. But this is old style which is soon going to be replaced by more intuitive configuration tools. So creating button on desktop panel is perahaps the easiest and most effective way. You can find list of cyrillic fonts aliases in /etc/X11/fonts/cyrillic/xfonts-cyrillic.alias

Eterm --font 9x15-cyrillic 
xterm -fn 10x16bold-cyrillic

Eterm and gnome-terminal are clever enough to understand that you need cyrillic fonts once it checked your LANG environment variable.

Entering russian characters from keyboard

1. Use command setxkbmap ru to set russian keyboard.

   
   setxkbmap ru                               (just give me the defaults)
   setxkbmap -option grp:ctrl_alt_toggle ru   (switch with Ctrl-Alt)
   setxkbmap ru-yawerty	                   (phonetic keyboard)
   setxkbmap ru-yawerty ak                    (my favorite phonetic modification)
   setxkbmap -compat group_led ru             (Scroll-Lock will be indicator)
   
   .... and many possible permutaions of above ....
   

   Naturally you may want to bind this command to an alias or button on gnome panel. After that start very useful keyboard indicator xxkb

2. Alternatively (I do not recommend this method) use command xrus with appropriate keyboard layout. Note that the first method and this one are incompatible and will not work together.

   
   xrus jcuken-koi8.xmm
   xrus yawerty-koi8.xmm 
   

   It is quite useful to bind this command with little button on your desktop panel. Clicking with a right button on little menu would bring options of this little program. You can setup for example key-combination which would switch english/russian keyboards.

   Note This program works correctly for almost all programs. Most notable exception is Mozilla

   Note If xlock will start your keyboard will remain russian. Then you won't be able to enter correct passoword (which is usually in english). The easiest way is to open terminal window (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and killing xrus program: killall xrus After that logout from terminal window and return back to X terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F7).

Setting up XEmacs

Add the following line to ~/.Xresources:
Emacs.default.attributeFont: -*-*-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-m-*-koi8-r

After that either restart your X session (logout and login again) or run command: xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

Add the following to your ~/.xemacs/init.el file.

Printing ASCII files with a2ps

a2ps -X koi8 -o russian.ps russian-koi8.txt
a2ps -X ms-cp1251 -o russian.ps russian-win.txt
a2ps -X iso5 -o russian.ps russian-iso5.txt

Options: --encoding=koi8

\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[koi8-r]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}   % load Babel setup for English

\begin{document}

  Русский текст о чем-то очень важном.  Таком важном что просто оторопь
  берет.  Должны переносы в этом тексте быть нормальными.  Правда русский и
  английский текст одновременно эта зараза не переносит.

\end{document}

en_US ISO-8859-1
ru_RU KOI8-R