What's New: A Closer Look
The Solaris 9 operating environment provides many new features that improve an already powerful and stable operating environment. This chapter describes some of the new features of the Solaris 9 release in more detail:
For a complete list of Solaris 9 features with brief descriptions, see chapters 2-4.
Language Support
The Solaris 9 operating environment now includes support for 162 locale environments, covering 39 languages on the Solaris 9 DVD, the Solaris 9 Software CDs, and the Solaris 9 Languages CD. See an overview of the language support features in Chapter 4. The following section provides more detail on some of these features.
New Asian Locale Support
Support for the New Chinese GB18030-2000 Character Set
Beginning with the Solaris 8 2/02 release, the Solaris platform enables input, display, and print for the entire GB18030-2000 character set (including nearly 30,000 characters). Any application that runs on the Solaris platform can thus benefit from a wider set of Chinese characters. These glyphs are primarily Han characters, but the encoding also includes glyphs for minority languages such as Tibetan, Wei, Yi, and Mongolian.
GB18030-2000 support in the Solaris 9 release also includes backward compatibility to previous Chinese codesets (GBK and GB2312), as well as conversion to other codesets such as Unicode. Solaris developers do not need to change their procedures to access this new encoding support. Standard toolkits can use the new support.
For Java applications that need GB18030-2000 support, review J2SE™ at the following Web site:
New Chinese and Korean Collation Locales
Collation locales provide different collation options to users, such as stroke count and radical, phonetic, and dictionary options.
Wordbreaker Modules for Thai
The wordbreaker module is used to correctly break the Thai text into proper paragraphs, sentences, and words within Motif.
New Asian UTF-8 (Unicode) Locales
The File System Safe Universal Transformation Format, or UTF-8, is an encoding that is defined by X/Open® as a multibyte representation of Unicode. UTF-8 encompasses almost all of the characters for traditional single-byte and multibyte locales for European and Asian languages for Solaris locales.
th_TH.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Thailand.
hi_IN.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for India.
zh_HK.UTF-8 locale is the Unicode locale for Hong Kong, China.
New Thai Input Method
The new Thai input method supports the Thai input standard, called the WIT, that is specified by the Thai government. The WIT has 3 levels: level 0, level 1, and level 2.
New Chinese input methods
More popular and powerful input methods (IM) in the Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese locales have been added for new character sets and new locales:
New Chuyin IM for Traditional Chinese locales
Cantonese IM for all Chinese locales
English-Chinese IM for all Chinese locales
New Auxiliary Window for Chinese Input Methods
The Auxiliary window provides an input method user interface (UI) that is "friendly" and extensible for all Chinese locales. New functions that are supported by the auxiliary window are as follows:
Input method switching
Input method properties configuration
Look-up tables for GB2312, GBK, GB18030, HKSCS, CNS, Big-5, and Unicode character sets
Code table management tool
A visual keyboard
New iconv Modules
iconv modules enable conversion between native encoded data and Unicode. The following new iconv modules have been added to support new character sets:
UTF-8 <---> HKSCS
UTF-8 <---> GB18030
UTF-8 <---> ISO8859-11
UTF-8 <---> Hindi