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IBus IME for linux


jbradfor

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I'm so excited I just need to share this with all of you.

I recently installed a new linux setup (Fedora 14), and was dreading installing SCIM. It's flaky, the pinyin only does simplified, and there are several systems on which I never got it working correctly.

Right after the install, I noticed a new icon, hovering over the icon it said "IBus input method framework". Hummm. Left click -> preferences -> Input Method -> Add was all that was needed to install a pinyin-based IME. And it just worked! No packages to install, no configuration files to adjust, nothing. Does traditional and simplified. Can enter multiple syllables at once and it will intelligently(?) show the choices. It also has bopomofo and chewing based IME, but I haven't tried those.

Anyway, if you run linux and you want a new IME, give it a try. jbradfor says two thumbs up ;)

Project homepage is here.

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It does just work! It's included by default in Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). All you have to do is go to the System > Preferences menu and select Keyboard Input Methods. Under the Input Methods tab, make sure to add Pinyin (or whatever you like). And it does seem to work much more smoothly than SCIM.

Thanks for the suggestion, jbradfor!

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On my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) systems I'm running ibus 1.3.9 from a ppa. Don't remember why. Maybe don't need it as 1.2.0 is in the repo. On my system the input method settings are under System/Preferences/IBus Preferences. I think I had to install the ibus-table-wubi package for wubi86 method to show up there.

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woohoo thanks for the suggestion jbradfor.

The pinyin worked right away, the wubi required a bit of looking around (I have an azerty keyboard, and it's fine for pinyin and French, but when typing in Wubi I need the qwerty mapping. So I needed to install the qwerty mapping separately, and when I want to type Wubi I switch both the keyboard mapping and ibus input method... is there a way to tell Ibus to use a different mapping depending on the input method?)

SCIM gave me no trouble about keyboard mapping, but it's really unstable in my environment for some reason, plus it hangs when I try to type in Perl/tk windows.

So far Ibus looks really nice :)

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Seems to be GNOME-only, so no go here.

christopher@desktop:~$ aptitude show ibus-qt4
Package: ibus-qt4
New: yes
State: not installed
Version: 1.3.0-1ppa1~lucid1
Priority: optional
Section: utils
Maintainer: LI Daobing <lidaobing@debian.org>
Uncompressed Size: 184k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.0.2), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.1.1), libibus-qt1, libicu42 (>= 4.2-1), libqt4-dbus (>= 4:4.5.3), libqt4-xml (>= 4:4.5.3), libqtcore4 (>= 4:4.6.1), libqtgui4 (>= 4:4.5.3), libstdc++6 (>= 4.1.1)
Description: qt-immodule for ibus (QT4)
IBus is an Intelligent Input Bus. It is a new input framework for Linux OS. It provides full featured and user friendly input method user interface. It also may help developers to develop input method easily. 

ibus-qt4 is the QT4 client of ibus, it provide a qt-immodule for ibus.

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It won't work without GConf, which is deprecated. And requires ORBit. IOW it won't work without GNOME.

I'll revisit it once they migrate to a freedesktop.org standard like DBus for message passing.

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renzhe, I feel your pain. I've been using KDE for nearly 10 years, and used CDE before that. However, since FC 14 uses gnome as the default, I decided to just stick with it. With the exception that I can't get 3-button emulation working on my mouse, I have to say even after years of KDE, gnome feels just fine to me.

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  • 1 month later...

For me, there is a little ibus icon along with the other "panel" icons. I use that to enable/disable the IME, and change the traditional/simplified.

If you don't have one of those, looking at the ps output, I assume the line that generates the icon is

/usr/bin/python /usr/share/ibus/ui/gtk/main.py

If you do have that icon, I left-click on the icon and then select "Chinese-pinyin". Once done, that icon changes to a 拼. Once done, I can left-click on the 拼 and it brings up a bunch of options, one of which is the traditional/simplified.

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Hmmm, I see the 拼 icon, but I don't see any simplified/traditional options under it when I left-click on it。 In fact, it seems that whenever I left-click on the 拼 icon, it immediately turns back into the default keyboard icon. What version of IBus are you using? Mine is 1.3.7.

Anyway, I went to the IBus page and found out the keyboard shortcut for switching between traditional and simplified is Ctrl+Shift+F. I guess I'll just have to keep that in mind.

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Ctrl+Shift+F -- "F" for "fantizi'; makes sense

I think I'm using 1.3.9. ["hangul" -- not sure I need that....]

# rpm -qa | grep -i ibus

ibus-gtk2-1.3.9-4.fc14.i686

ibus-chewing-1.3.9.2-1.fc14.i686

ibus-hangul-1.3.1-1.fc14.i686

ibus-pinyin-1.3.11-1.fc14.i686

ibus-m17n-1.3.2-5.fc14.i686

ibus-1.3.9-4.fc14.i686

ibus-rawcode-1.3.1.20100707-1.fc14.i686

ibus-libs-1.3.9-4.fc14.i686

ibus-anthy-1.2.6-1.fc14.i686

ibus-pinyin-db-open-phrase-1.3.11-1.fc14.noarch

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