I know exactly what you mean about wanting your computers to just work 
I will release the flashcard files seperatly aswell so anyone can grab them, I figured I'd make a master one, then smaller ones for different applications like Firefox, etc.
Installing Ubuntu is really easy now, they've gone to great lenghts to make it user friendly, it's easier than windows to install and your hardware will probably work perfectly straight away. About the IME, it works like the windows one, I atcually have a Japanese laptop, but I think most Japanese people don't even use that direct map thing - I wouldn't have a clue how it works. So my howto will pick up after you've installed Ubuntu, getting the IME going is pretty easy and adding all the other Japanese support isn't too hard either, but I want to cover more things like installing JWPce using WINE, installing all the firefox plugins like Rikaichan and Japanize, and any other software that might be useful to Japanese students. Once all this is done, Japanese will be your users language prefrence, not the default system language, so you can set Japanese as default for your user and also change it back at the Login screen - one other thing you can do is have another user with English as their default language so if you get stuck and can't figure it out with the dictionary or rikaichan you can hit the 'lock screen' button which loads the screensaver, and use the 'change user' button to go to your English account. So basically we just need to install support for Japanese and we can use it if we want to and always have English there for when we're doing difficult tasks where we need to read the errors properly, etc. So I'll start by making that flashcard file complete, I was just going to automatically rip the vocab out of the programs, but that will be way too much so I'm doing it manually, I'm also ignoring the grammar, inflected verbs, etc, and just having the word in it's plain form, so I'm not translating the whole text strings or anything. If one of you guys are keen to try setting up this system, I can walk you through what you've gotta do. Any other feedback about other things I should include would be great aswell. Cheers guys
Here's a screenshot of my desktop: http://treshna.com/~krusher/shot.png
I often paste things into that text area box that I cut and pasted from dialogs and emails, IM's, etc so I can use rikaichan.
I will release the flashcard files seperatly aswell so anyone can grab them, I figured I'd make a master one, then smaller ones for different applications like Firefox, etc. Installing Ubuntu is really easy now, they've gone to great lenghts to make it user friendly, it's easier than windows to install and your hardware will probably work perfectly straight away. About the IME, it works like the windows one, I atcually have a Japanese laptop, but I think most Japanese people don't even use that direct map thing - I wouldn't have a clue how it works. So my howto will pick up after you've installed Ubuntu, getting the IME going is pretty easy and adding all the other Japanese support isn't too hard either, but I want to cover more things like installing JWPce using WINE, installing all the firefox plugins like Rikaichan and Japanize, and any other software that might be useful to Japanese students. Once all this is done, Japanese will be your users language prefrence, not the default system language, so you can set Japanese as default for your user and also change it back at the Login screen - one other thing you can do is have another user with English as their default language so if you get stuck and can't figure it out with the dictionary or rikaichan you can hit the 'lock screen' button which loads the screensaver, and use the 'change user' button to go to your English account. So basically we just need to install support for Japanese and we can use it if we want to and always have English there for when we're doing difficult tasks where we need to read the errors properly, etc. So I'll start by making that flashcard file complete, I was just going to automatically rip the vocab out of the programs, but that will be way too much so I'm doing it manually, I'm also ignoring the grammar, inflected verbs, etc, and just having the word in it's plain form, so I'm not translating the whole text strings or anything. If one of you guys are keen to try setting up this system, I can walk you through what you've gotta do. Any other feedback about other things I should include would be great aswell. Cheers guys
Here's a screenshot of my desktop: http://treshna.com/~krusher/shot.png
I often paste things into that text area box that I cut and pasted from dialogs and emails, IM's, etc so I can use rikaichan.
Edited: 2006-09-24, 7:10 pm