TuxTips

A few days ago I decided to start learning Japanese. I expected to have a difficult path ahead of me, as Japanese is a notoriously difficult language for westerners to learn. After running up to my local bookstore, and picking up several books and CDs on the Japanese language, and getting the Adobe Shockwave plugin installed using Crossover Office (A great version of wine, I definitely recommend it if you find the vanilla wine to be too cumbersome); and making myself slightly poorer buy getting a subscription to the online version of Rosetta Stone I found myself facing a difficulty that I hadn’t originally expected. My English version of Slackware with Dropline Gnome and a US keyboard layout allowed me no easy way to insert Japanese script into documents. This meant that I would have difficult learning to read and write Japanese, as well as practicing Japanese by talking with my Japanese speaking friends online.
Knowing that there had to be a solution to this problem, I set out on the internet to find out. Unfortunately, the general (and reasonable) assumption is that if you want to be able to input Japanese characters, you probably read Japanese. For someone just learning the language, I found a lot of the documentation rather incomprehensable. With some effort I figured out how to get everything working, and have here a guide that should help others who want to enable Japanese character input.
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great benefits of Linux is it’s extensibility. For Gnome users, one of the great ways that you can easy expand and customize your desktop is with Nautilus scripts. In this article I discuss using Nautilus scripts to enhance your Gnome experience, as well as providing a couple of starter scripts.
Read the rest of this entry »