Gutsy and Chinese
After 3 days playing with Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, I would say that I am not very satisfied with it; the ratio between excitement and disappointment is 4 to 6.
The excitement comes from the new Compiz and all the new upgrades and features, the disappointment comes from the support to Chinese language.
I love beautiful desktop effects, but I have to admit that, for me, the eye candy stuff only has a little influence to the regular use of computer. On the other hand, the Chinese support plays an important role: I need to read and write Chinese in order to communicate with my family and friends, most of them don’t know English at all.
When I was in the age of 6.10 and 7.04, I found that the Chinese support was smooth and sweet; all things were setup by just few mouse clicks. But it is not true at this time. After I installed this fresh guy and enabled the Chinese support, I could read only “some” Chinese at the beginning, there were lots of characters were missing on Chinese web pages and SCIM (input method) was not functional properly (in the way it worked in 7.04), so I couldn’t type Chinese in Firefox.
It is frustrating!
Solving the missing characters problem is easy. I just installed an open source Chinese font, WenQuanYi Zen Hei (really good one, highly recommended!), into my system, then the problem was gone. Unfortunately, the SCIM problem is not that easy. I tried several different solutions I could find on Internet, but none of them was working, so I almost gave up. Lucky enough, my last try saved my life. I switched the default language to be English (United States of America) — the previous one is English (Canada) — SCIM then was working in the way I expected.
Now, I get everything working nicely, but it took me one night or more to figure all the tricks out. It’s kind of wasting of time, a desktop operating system should NOT work in this fashion.
