Belarusian-HOWTO

1.1. History

This document was started in September 15, 1999 by Alexander Mikhailian

1.2. Comments

Comments on this HOWTO may be directed to the author mikhailian@altern.org.

1.3. New Versions

The newest version can always be found at the bellinux page.

1.4. Copyright

This manual may be reproduced in whole or in part without restrictions.

1.5. Acknowledgements and Thanks

Thanks to everyone who gave comments as I was writing this.

2.1. Choosing Charset

As for now, the choice is mainly between windows-1251 and iso-8859-5. Windows-1251 provides compatibility with M$ Windows and it is by far the most popular charset for nearly all slavic languages. On the other side, iso-8859-5 is better supported and easier to set up.

The present HOWTO will explain the use of both charsets in parallel. Unless otherwise stated in the text, Belarusian support package from the bellinux page contains all the files mentioned in the present HOWTO.

2.2. windows-1251 in the kernel

Windows-1251 support in the kernel is needed to visualize MS Windows filenames in cyrillic while the console and X Window system are localized in windows-1251. As latest FAT file systems store filenames in Unicode, we have to define the output charset of the Virtual File System layer and install the support for windows-1251 in the kernel.

There is a patch for 2.2.14 kernels that is included in the Belarusian support package. To apply the patch,

• cd /path_to_your_kernel_source_tree

• patch -p0 < patch_for_the_kernel.patch

• Recompile and reinstall the kernel modules. Refer to Kernel-HOWTO for the details.

• Add

  codepage=866,iocharset=microsoft-cp1251

  to your mount options in order to get the filenames in windows-1251.

  To test the setup, execute

  mount /dev/hda -t vfat -o codepage=866,iocharset=iso8859-5 /mnt/hda

  as root. Of course, you should replace /dev/hda by the name of your vfat partitions containing names in cyrillic.

2.3. ISO-8859-5 in the kernel

There is built-in support for iso-8859-5 in Linux kernel. To enable iso-8859-5, make sure you compile this module in the nls section of the kernel setup. Normally, iso-8859-5 is compiled by default and can be loaded either automatically or by issuing

 insmod nls_iso8859-5
				

Add

 codepage=866,iocharset=iso8859-5
							

2.4. Setting locale

• Belarusian locale is available in glibc 2.2 and later. If you do not have the belarusian locale installed in your system, you can compile it yourself. The source is available at the bellinux page. Issue

  localedef -f CP1251 -i be_BY be_BY.CP1251

  or

  localedef -f ISO-8899-5 -i be_BY be_BY.ISO-8899-5

  to compile the locale in windows-1251 encoding or iso8859-5 encoding.

• Check how it works by setting the locale

  set LANG=be_BY.CP1251; export LANG

  or

  set LANG=be_BY.ISO-8859-5; export LANG

  and running a locale-aware program like date or cal.

2.5. Belarusian in console

2.6. Belarusian in X Window System

 XkbModel   "microsoft"
 XkbLayout  "by"
 XkbOptions "grp:caps_toggle"										
				

3.1. Emacs

Emacs is able to display Belarusian characters out of box in many Linux distributions. However, the following conditions should satisfy:

• Cyrillic iso-8859-5 fonts should be installed.

• Emacs-mule package should be installed.

The user may want to change the default keyboard layout ("input method" in emacs slang) to jcuken. This feature is provided by belarusian.el along with some other goodies. Read the comments in the beginning of belarusian.el for details on the setup procedure.

After installing belarusian.el, you will be able to switch the input method, by typing C-\-cyrillic-belarusian-RET

For a more user-friendly setup, put the following lines in the .emacs file:

 ;; enables PC-like key mappings
 (pc-bindings-mode) 
 ;; enables PC-like selection
 (pc-selection-mode)
 ;; highlight selection
 (transient-mark-mode t)
 ;; use as many multilingual fonts as possible
 (set-default-font "fontset-standard") 
 ;; set up windows-1251 as default encoding everywhere
 (codepage-setup 1251)
 (set-terminal-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (set-keyboard-coding-system nil)
 (setq default-buffer-file-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (set-selection-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (prefer-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'windows-1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'microsoft-1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'microsoft-cp1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'windows-cp1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'koi8-u 'cyrillic-koi8)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'KOI8-R 'cyrillic-koi8)
 (modify-coding-system-alist 'file "\.*" 'cp1251)
 (modify-coding-system-alist 'file "\\.el$" 'iso-2022-7bit)					
				

3.2. Spell-checking

• If you do not have ispell 3.1.20, install it from any Linux distribution CD.

• Download the package belspell.tar.gz. Unpack it and run

  buildhash belarusian.sml belarusian.aff belarusian.hash

• Copy belarusian.hash to </usr/lib/ispell or wherever your ispell hash tables are.

• in order to spell-check a file, type

  ispell -d belarusian yourfile.txt

Getting belarusian ispell dictionary working with emacs is a bit tricky.

• Copy ispell.el and ispell.elc into your $EMACSBIN/../lisp directory.

• Copy temporarily $EMACSBIN/../lisp/loaddefs.el to /usr/src/emacs-XX.X/lisp/loaddefs.el where XX.X stand for emacs version number.

• M-x-update-file-autoloads-RET and enter the path to the ispell.el.

• Copy back loaddefs.el

• Restart emacs

3.3. TeX

from Aleksey Novodvorsky:

You need TeX + babel + T2, e.g. teTeX >= 1.0. in order to get partial support for Belarusian,

• put babel.sty , belarusianb.ldf and belarusianb.sty into /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/babel

• run texhash

• To use Belarusian in LaTeX: add the following lines in the preamble:

  \documentclass[belarusian]{article} \usepackage[cp1251]{inputenc} \usepackage{babel}

  or

  \documentclass[belarusian]{article} \usepackage[iso88595]{inputenc} \usepackage{babel}

4.1. Netscape

It is often a problem to correctly visualize Belarusian-specific characters with Netscape. This is due to that Netscape 4.x looks for any koi8-r font and, if it finds one, they refuse to use other fonts for displaying Cyrillic pages.

The problem is solved by removing koi8-r fonts from everywhere - X Window System font path and font server path.Then install koi8-ru, iso-8859-5 or windows-1251 and run

xset fp rehash
				

Links to koi8-ru, iso-8859-5 and windows-1251 cyrillic fonts for X Window System can be found at the bellinux page

4.2. Lynx

In order to view Belarusian sites, you have to set up you console to handle the encoding you need. See section Section 2.5 for more details.

Add the following lines to your .linxrc file.

character_set=Cyrillic (windows-1251) preferred_language=be
preferred_charset=windows-1251
				

character_set=Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5) preferred_language=be
preferred_charset=iso-8859-5
				

If the page you are browsing does not have an explicit charset declaration, press o and set the document charset manually.

5.1. Netscape Messenger

Netscape Messenger can not handle belarusian texts properly. The same applies to Mozilla.

5.2. Mutt

Mutt handles a multitude of charsets and encodings with ease. If your console has windows-1251 support, add the following lines to your .muttrc:

 charset-hook "windows-1251" "cp1251" set charset="windows-1251"
				

Mutt automatically converts all incoming messages for the screen output. It can also convert outgoing messages basing itself on a versatile pattern matching mechanism, e.g. the following line in .muttrc will force mutt to convert all messages sent to be-locale@iatp.unibel.by to koi8-r.

send-hook '~t ^be-locale@iatp\.unibel\.by$' 'set
send_charset="koi8-r"'