I was helping someone install the simplified Chinese language in KDE the other day. After installing the kde-i18n Chinese and Simplified Chinese language packs for KDE we installed the fonts-chinese pack for CentOS. Then we went to turn on the new language. Open Control Center -> Regional and Accessibility -> Country/Region & Language. We Selected Add Language, select Chinese or Simplified Chinese. Clicked Apply. Most of the characters looked like little boxes (squares). I'm no world traveler but I do know Chinese characters are not all boxes.
After searching all settings and making sure all the packages for Chinese fonts for the OS and for KDE are installed I found out the problem. You have to change the font type to Sans Serif or another mono spaced font. The little boxes go away after that.
Here's a little suggestion for the KDE developers. If a font for a language needs to be mono space let's try to switch to a mono space font when the language that needs it is selected.
I did find any easy way to install all the Chinese language support on CentOS. Just use the following command.
yum groupinstall "Chinese Support"
If you want to put something in your kde menu but don't want to use the kdemenuedit program you can do it by doing the following. Change directory to your ~/.kde/share/applnk dir. If you want your links in the main menu the just create the following example files in this directory. If you want your links in a folder then just create a directory (mkdir apps) and put the following example files in that directory. If there is a directory that already exists and you create the same name here the links will be appended to that directory. The files can be called anything but must end in ".desktop". The format is in the following example. I think the global kde menu is in "/usr/share/applnk/".
[Desktop Entry] Comment=Excel Encoding=UTF-8 Exec="/usr/local/bin/excel" Icon=/usr/share/icons/Microsoft+Office+Excel+2003.xpm InitialPreference=3 MimeType=application/msexcel Name=Microsoft Excel Terminal=false Type=Application
I had a problem upgrading from the beta KDE 3.2 Debian to the stable 3.2.1. Getting error messges like:
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/kdelibs-bin_4%3a3.2.1-1_i386.deb (--unpack): trying to overwrite `/etc/menu-methods/freedesktop-desktop-entry-spec-apps', which is also in package kicker dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe) Errors were encountered while processing: /var/cache/apt/archives/kdelibs-bin_4%3a3.2.1-1_i386.deb E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
To solve this I switched to the directory were apt-get put's it's downloads (/var/cache/apt/archives). Then executed the following command on the package(s) that were having problems: "dpkg --force-all -i [package]". Then: "dpkg -f install". That cleared it right up.
