李钊 LI, Zhao's blog

I have a very old laptop with PII 300Mhz CPU. I managed to install Gentoo Linux before, but seldom use it. Today, When I was cleaning my desktop, found it, but I forgot almost everything about Gentoo when I want to install sth.

It is burdonsome to install anything on such a old Gentoo box, so, it is the time shift to a light Linux distribution, such as DSL and puppy.

After spend 10mins to download DSL 3.3 RC2, it bootup the PII in 1 min. Wow, it really rocks on my ancient machine. Unfortunately, it does not support Chinese. However, by studying mydslPanel (the tools to install software on DSL) for half an hour, my Firefox can display Chinese fonts properly already.

To install chinese fonts, please do:

1. Install japanese-fonts using mydslPanel on desktop, it will download japanese-fonts.tar.gz to /tmp by default.
2. copy /tmp/usr /usr
3. copy some fonts file from another Linux system supporting Chinese. I am running Ubuntu on another laptop, so, I copy all /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/* from the Ubuntu to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
4. run /usr/bin/japanese-install.sh

Now, your DSL is chinese-awared.

These days, I am trying to write a crossplatform tools (https://sourceforge.net/projects/bloghub) using JAVA, on a Kubuntu laptop. Although I expected that Linux JAVA chinese support could be much better than 5 years, when I use JAVA to do development, I am so disappointed that my JAVA system just show all Chinese characters as blank boxes.

Fortunately, the solution is quite simple:

1. Search where is your system chinese fonts are, e.g., I use simhei&simsun; from M$, at /usr/local/share/fonts.
2. cd $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/fonts
3. ln -s /usr/local/share/fonts fallback

Is it simple? Sure we can adjust the fonts to display better, but that’s enough for me. Good luck!