Has anyone tried this? Thus far the only way i can think of to make swich between english and japanese is to change users.

Does anyone know of a better way? Better yet, is there a linux distribution that has integrated language support that allows eng/jap easy switching?

Why do you need to switch? Just keep it in Japanese, you can still type in English.

What do you mean switch between english and japanese? You want your programs to run in japanese sometimes and english other times? You could try changing the locale, maybe creating shortcuts to run the apps that way...
i.e. LANG=ja_JP LC_ALL=ja_JP oowriter
That may not be totally right, I haven't used linux in 4 years or so so just going off memory there. If you want it to affect everything when you login, maybe toss
export LANG=ja_JP
export LC_ALL=ja_JP
into ~/.login (I believe... someone correct me if I'm wrong though).

If you just meant input (the IME), there should be some keyboard shortcut for switching easily...

If you just mean IME, you can switch easily by pressing ctrl + space (at least it works using SKIM)

bombpersons Wrote:If you just mean IME, you can switch easily by pressing ctrl + space (at least it works using SKIM)

I use SKIM (Scim/Anthy/whatever) on Kubuntu. It's a bit of a pain because it's pretty likely to break exactly when you don't want it to, but I've done it for about a year now over multiple versions.

As for changing the whole OS's language... yeah, switching users is probably the way to go. I have a hard enough time keeping it in just English. The console stuff wants to be japanese even if all I've done is install SKIM. lol