Minicom Native Language Support

Now minicom has internationalization (i18n for short) support. To make it

work please do the following steps:

- make sure you have gettext installed and if you compile the program

yourself, check src/Makefile that "PO = po" is defined and "-D_I18N_"

is included in the OPFLAGS definition

- in your profile (/etc/profile or something like that for the system 

profile, or $HOME/.profile for your personal profile) include the 

following environment variable settings:

---------------------------- 8< ------------------------------------------

LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1 # or the correct ISO code for your character set

LANG=pt_BR          # change pt_BR to the correct iso code for your language

export LANG LC_CTYPE

---------------------------- 8< ------------------------------------------

In the next login just run minicom!

Currently supported languages are Brasilian Portuguese (pt_BR), Finnish

(fi), Hungarian (hu), Japanese (ja_JP.sjis and ja_JP.ujis), French (fr),

Polish (pl), Czech (cs), Spanish (es) and Russian (ru).

Turkish translations are under construction (for a long time... :( ).

If you want to add support for more languages, this is what to do:

(I suppose you already have downloaded and unpacked the source packet)

- go to the po directory

- copy minicom.pot (or some existing *.po file) as xx.po where xx is the

  iso code for your language

- edit the xx.po file to include the translations of the English strings

  to your language. The lines beginning with "msgid" contain the English

  string, and the lines beginning with "msgstr" is where you should write

  the translations. See the existing *.po files.

  Check that the translated strings fit their places and don't overflow.

  (This shouldn't cause problems in running the program, but the user

  might not understand the truncated text, and screen layouts may become

  ugly.)

  Pay special attention to the dialing directory menu (Dial/Find/Add etc.)

  if you translate it, check that the highlight cursor makes sense.

  The width of the highlight will be the length of the whole string divided

  by the number of entries. Pad the string with spaces where necessary so

  that there is a reasonable "cell" for each entry.

- add xx (the iso code of your language) to the ALL_LINGUAS list in

  the "configure" and "configure.in" files (depending on where you got the

  source, you might not have both of them) in the minicom source base

  directory and rerun ./configure to add it to all the other necessary

  places.

- run "make" and "make install" in the minicom source base directory,

  or if you don't want to compile the program itself, you can just run

  them in the po directory. You'll probably need the root permissions to

  run "make install", but not for anything else in the process.

- send your xx.po file to the address(es) below to get it included in

  the next version of Minicom. I'd appreciate it if you are willing to

  make the necessary changes to the translation file as the program itself

  is changed.. it is best done by a native speaker of the language, and

  I don't even understand all the languages in the world!

- when new versions are released some new strings probably become available

  for translation, please go to the src/po directory and execute make

  update-po, the new strings will be added to the catalogs and should then

  be translated. Note that any strings already translated but modified

  should be also fixed/translated. The old ones will be left commented at

  the end of the catalog.

Sat 21 Mar 1998 - Fri 21 Dec 2001

Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@conectiva.com.br>

Jukka Lahtinen <walker@netsonic.fi>