Chinese e-mail from Linux?

[Forrest Cahoon <forrest@pconline.com>]

Hello, everybody.

I've recently become interested in the Chinese language, and have been
trying to figure out how to send Chinese e-mail from my Linux box.

I typically use emacs 20.2 as my editor and mutt as my e-mail program,
so I have been concentrating on getting emacs' MULE (Multi-Language
Environment ... or something like that) to work, and then I'll worry
about what the correct MIME type is.

So far, I've figured out how to display Chinese characters properly
when I do M-x view-hello-file: this involves setting the fontset, and
I'd be glad to describe what I've found out if anyone has an interest.

Now, I need to get at least one input method for Chinese characters
working.  When I attempt to set the input method from the MULE menu, I
see a message that it can't find quail/py-punct.el, probably because
LEIM (Library of Emacs Input Methods) isn't installed.  So I went
looking for LEIM -- I didn't find a .deb package (my system is
Debian), but I got leim-20.3.tar.gz from the main emacs source site
(maybe ftp.gnu.org? ... I forget ...)  When I extract the tarball, it
created the directory emacs-20.3/leim with quail and various other
directories under it.  From the root directory name, I'm guessing it's
set up to be build along with a source build of emacs (which I'm not
thrilled about doing).

Besides quail, there is a directory called CXTERM-DIC, about which the
README in the leim directory makes the following note:

| This directory contains source dictionaries (TIT format) for Chinese
| input method distribued with cxterm (Chinese version xterm).  These
| dictionaries are automatically converted to Quail packages (Emacs Lisp
| source file) by `make'.

There is a Makefile.in, but no Makefile, and no configure.  When I
tried simply putting the leim directory in my emacs load path, I got
the message that it couldn't find quail/PY.  There's no PY.el or
PY.elc in the quail directory, but there is a PY.tit in the CXTERM-DIC
directory.  It looks like PY.el (or .elc) is supposed to be made from
PY.tit with "make", but I don't have all the files.  I guess if I did
a complete emacs source build with the leim directory in the tree,
this would be part of the build.  Is there an easier way?

-- 
| Forrest Cahoon      | forrest@pconline.com |------------------------------|
| 850 21st Ave SE     |----------------------| Only unbalanced people       |
| Mpls MN  55414-2514 |                      |        can tip the scales... |