Re: Language support in Solaris

Sourav,

You make some very important points.  Let me explain a few things.

Saying something is "internationalised" isn't very descriptive.  There are all
sorts of ways and points of support in internationalization, and no product in
the world does them all.  So, this may give you an understanding of the
following explanation.

Yes, Solaris 2.6 has a trememndous amount of internationalization.  Solaris 7
has more, Solaris 8 has even more, and Solaris 9 still more.  We are always
adding support for more languages, scripts, locales, and standards, as well as
improving integration and performance.

The reason for the Simplified Chinese Solaris 7 Operating Environment, Japanese
Solaris 7 Operating Environment, etc., is that those releases contain a
localized user interface.  The OS itself is no different, but now the user has a
translated interface.  Also, in Solaris 2.6 and 7, some of the language-specific
processing files are not included in the base product.  For example, if you have
English Solaris 2.6 loaded, there are neither fonts nor input methods nor
locales for Simplified Chinese.  But these can simply be added to the English
installation using the Global Application Developer Kit; reinstallation of the
operating system is _not_ necessary.  So the OS can handle the data once you
provide a few extra files specific to that data.

Note that in Solaris 8 and subsequent releases, support for the world's major
charsets, scripts, and languages is available on the same CD as the base OS.  
You may choose to install whichever languages/locales you want to include using
the installer, and can add support later as you need it.  So you don't need to
order a second CD (or download separate files) to get language support.  The
only files which are on a separate CD are the translations of the user
interface.   Here on my desk, I have Solaris 8 with all the languages and
locales installed, and I can type Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional
Chinese, Korean, Russian, etc. even though I have only installed from the base
product.

I realize this isn't directly related to the WWW, but if you're supporting Web
applications from Solaris, this is important to know.

I hope this answers your questions.  If you have more, please feel free to email
me directly.

Regards,
Andrea

souravm wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I have a doubt regarding the language support in Solaris OS. According to my understanding from 2.6 onwards Solaris OS is internationalised. If a Solaris OS has a support for locale(s) specific for a language it can be used for that language. Hence there is no need to have a language specific OS. To be precise, if I have a Solaris OS which can presently support English only, I can make it to support Japanese language once I install the proper option pack for the corresponding locale (related to Japanese language).
> 
> Now the doubt is if this is the case then why there are versions of Solaris like - Simplified Chinese Solaris 7 Operating Environment, Japanese Solaris 7 Operating Environment, etc. ?
> 
> Regards,
> Sourav

Received on Friday, 12 April 2002 13:25:01 UTC