Credits: This page is mostly a copy/paste from English on the Sharp SL-A300 written by Dave Lowndes.

Disclamer: This procedure may broke your operating system and force you to format/full reset your device. Proceed at your own risk!

Get the right font

The problem is that English fonts and Japanese fonts are different. Of course the Japanese font includes latin characters, but for some reason in English mode Qtopia will switch to English-only fonts.

To correct that, we need to use a unicode font including Japanese character, but made for an English system. Download and install the following package:

• unismall_1.0.0_arm.ipk
• mirror

Make the switch

Now the tough part. If you don't know Unix you could get into troubles, so be careful. For A300, you need to download the terminal application.

• qpe-terminal_1.5.0-2_arm.ipk

  Open a terminal session and type the following:

  • bash-2.05# cd /home/QtPalmtop/lib/
  • bash-2.05# mkdir fonts.good
  • bash-2.05# cp fonts/* fonts.good/
  • bash-2.05# cd fonts
  • bash-2.05# cat fontdir | grep uni > fontdir.new
  • bash-2.05# vi fontdir.new

  This will open up the vi editor. If you never heard about vi before, have a look here but know that vi is hard to master!

  Use vi to copy the second line and edit so the file looks like:

  • unifont unismall.bdf BDF n 50 100 u
  • unifont unifont.bdf BDF n 50 160 u

  Replace the old file with the new: and remove some fonts so the system is forced to use the unicode ones:

  • bash-2.05# rm fontdir
  • bash-2.05# mv fontdir.new fontdir
  • bash-2.05# rm helv fixed sm*

  Reset the device, and that should be done.