Chapter 2 Contents of the Base Solaris Product

Summary of the Base Product

Solaris 7 includes partial locales, which provide the functionality needed for entering, displaying, and printing in local languages while using an English interface. It also includes the en_US.UTF-8 locale, which also uses an English interface, and supports the Unicode UTF-8 character encoding standard.

The base English Solaris 7 product includes the Euro full locales, a number of partial European locales as well as the en_US.UTF-8 locale.

The File System Safe Universal Transformation Format, or UTF-8, is an encoding defined by X/Open as a multi-byte representation of Unicode. UTF-8 is a variant of UNICODE. UTF-8 provides input and output support for all Solaris single-byte locales.

Partial locales can be split into two groups: the core set and the extended set. The core set is packaged in SUNWploc (operating system locale) and SUNWplow (window system locale). Since these packages are part of the end user cluster, they are installed automatically. The extended set of locales is packaged in SUNWploc1 (operating system locale) and SUNWplow1 (Window system locale). SUNWpldte has CDE support for the Eastern European locales.

SUNWploc1 and SUNWplow1 are available on the entire cluster only. SUNWploc1 and SUNWplow1 need to be added to your system before you can use the locales in the extended set.

Core Set of Locales

The core set of locales is installed automatically. The core sets are listed in Table 2-1.

New Locales

Solaris software already supports most of the Western European locales and, in this release, has focused on expanding its support for the Eastern European, Thai, and the Middle Eastern regions. New and changed user locales in the Solaris 7 operating environment are listed in Table 2-2

Solaris 7 software has added support for the Euro currency by adding six new user locales. These are included in Table 2-3 Note that local currency symbols are still available for backwards compatibility.

Extended Set of Locales

The extended set of locales is not installed automatically. If you want to use locales listed in Table 2-4 you need to install them manually.

Unicode Locale: en_US.UTF-8

The en_US.UTF-8 locale is a multiscript locale that can input and output text in multiple scripts, including single-byte and multi-byte scripts. This locale is part of the developer cluster. This is the first locale with this capability in the Solaris operating environment.

This locale uses UTF-8 (Universal Character Set Transformation Format for 8 bits) encoding, which was developed by the X/Open-Uniforum Joint Internationalization Working Group (XoJIG). This standard has been adopted by the Unicode Consortium, the International Standards Organization, and the International Electrotechnical Commission as a part of Unicode 2.0 and ISO/IEC 10646-1.

en_US.UTF-8 supports computation for every code point value, which is defined in Unicode 2.0 and ISO/IEC 10646-1. In Solaris 7, language script support is not limited to pan-European locales, but also includes Asian scripts such as Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese. Input method support has been enabled for the following language scripts only. Due to limited font resources, Solaris 7 software includes only character glyphs from the following codesets:

• ISO 8859-1 (most Western European languages, such as English, French, Spanish, and German)

• ISO 8859-2 (most Central European languages, such as Czech, Polish, and Hungarian)

• ISO 8859-4 (Scandinavian and Baltic languages)

• ISO 8859-5 (Russian)

• ISO 8859-6 (Arabic)

• ISO 8859-7 (Greek)

• ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew)

• ISO 8859-9 (Turkish)

• ISO 8859-11 (Thai) or TIS 620.2533

User Locales in the Base Solaris Product

The Base Solaris 7 product includes the locale support listed in Table 2-5.

These locales are supported through the SUNWploc1 (for operating system support), SUNWplow1 (for OpenWindows support), and SUNWpldte (for locales support) packages, which are part of the entire cluster. The fonts for these locales have the format SUNiXxf.

• iX represents the ISO 8859 codeset.

• xf indicates whether the font is optional or required.

SUNWi1rf contains the required font and SUNWi1of contains the optional font for an ISO 8859-1 codeset locale. These packages are in different clusters; install the entire cluster or selectively add the appropriate packages. After the packages have been installed, users can login through dtlogin to either CDE or OpenWindows and use the characters associated with their locale.

Multiple Key Compose Sequences for Locales

The Solaris 7 operating environment supports "compose sequences" to create the diacritical marks used in writing the scripts covered in the following codesets:

• ISO 8859-2 (Latin2) Czech, Polish, and Hungarian

• ISO 8859-4 (Latin4) Latvian and Lithuanian

• ISO 8859-9 (Latin5) Turkish

These are the diacritic characters that can be created with the following keys and the Compose key.

• diaeresis = citation ( " ) (for example, Compose + A + " = Ä)

• caron = v (for example, Compose + E + v = E caron)

• breve = u

• ogonek = a

• doubleacute = > greater

• degree symbol = O + 0 (o plus zero)

• currency symbol = 0 + x (zero plus x)

Keyboard Support in the Base Solaris 7 Product

The following locales have keyboard layouts for SPARC (X-server) and X86 (Xserver PLUS console):

• Czech

• Hungary

• Poland

• Latvia

• Lithuania

• Russia

• Greece

• Turkey

[X-server is CDE and OW, console is command line]

Changing Between Keyboards on SPARC

Support for changing layouts in the Solaris product is achieved only by using the dip-switch settings under the keyboard. The keyboard layout is determined by the dip switches. A list of keyboard layouts and corresponding defined dip-switch settings is at /usr/openwin/share/etc/keytables/keytable.map.

The following table Table 2-6 is for a type 4 keyboard .(1=switch up 0=switch down).

Changing the layout from U.S./UK to Czech is done by changing the dip-switch settings to the setting defined in the file (the file defines the switches in hex. This needs to be converted into binary as it was shown in Table 2-6) and then re-booting.

Russian and Greek keyboard support can be toggled on and off using the SPARC Compose key (Ctrl+Shift+F1 on x86).

Changing Between Keyboards on x86

On x86, a keyboard is selected during the kdmconfig part of install. To change this at any time after installation, use kdmconfig:

1. Exit CDE/OW to the command line.

2. Type kdmconfig -u (kdmconfig unconfigure).

3. Type kdmconfig to run the program.

4. Follow instructions to get a keyboard layout.

There are no `utilities' for either SPARC or x86 (apart from standard UNIX tools such as xmodmap, pcmapkeys) bundled into Solaris 7 for switching keyboards.

Codesets for x86

The default codeset on the Solaris system for x86 is ISO-8859-1. The IBM DOS 437 codeset is provided as an option in text mode. That is, if you choose to download IBM DOS 437 codeset by typing:

loadfont -c 437
pcmapkeys -f /usr/share/lib/keyboards/437/en_US

there is no support for nonstandard U.S. date, time, currency, numbers, units, and collation. There will be no support for non-English message and text presentation, and no multibyte character support. Therefore, non-Microsoft Windows users should use the IBM DOS 437 codeset only in the default C locale.

• You must be in the text mode to download the IBM codeset, not the graphics mode.

• If you are not using the standard U.S. PC keyboard, replace en_US with the keyboard map related to your keyboard.

• To download the default codeset in text mode, type:

  loadfont -c 8859 pcmapkeys -f /usr/share/lib/keyboards/8859/en_US

• See the man Pages(1): User Commands loadfont(1)and pcmapkeys(1)man pages.

Locales in the Base Installation

The installation window in the base Solaris 7 product offers several English language locales. To use 8-bit characters, install one of the en_XX options, as shown in Table 2-7. The locale used in the installation becomes the default system locale.

Using JumpStart

To enable JumpStart^TM for the 8-bit locales, add the line localexx (substituting the appropriate 8-bit locale for xx, for example, en_US) to the JumpStart profile file. (For complete instructions, see Chapter 4 of Automating Solaris Installation, available from SunSoft Press.) Current JumpStart users should set the default locale to bypass the language prompt during installation.