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>
