Help activating Linux SCIM

[in_lab]

I just installed Ubuntu and I am having trouble activating SCIM for Chinese input. Everything works fine if I log in with the system language set to Chinese, but if I log in with the system set to English then I can't activate SCIM. The settings appear to be correct (it shows that there is support for Chinese input methods installed), it's just that SCIM does not appear when I enter the hotkey (ctrl-space). Any ideas?

[Ninja]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM

[jannetuukkanen]

Right-click on the input area and select input method from the drop-down menu. Now you can use the C-space hot key. Follow the link Ninja provided, and use im-switch to set SCIM as default IM for locales other than Chinese.

JanneT

[in_lab]

The suggestion on that page is that I use:

im-switch -z “your locale” -s scim

It says the only way to undo this statement is to reinstall the OS, so I wanted to be sure that it is really neccessary.

After that statement, SCIM should be the default input for all applications. I'm not sure if this is correct, but It sounds like I would then have to close SCIM whenever I want to input English, even though all I want to do is to occaisonally activate SCIM to input Chinese.

Edit: I'll try right-clicking in the input area as soon as I get to the computer. Thanks.

[Battosai]

I would personaly try THIS before I try the im-switch.

The im switch works well

You will not need to disable SCIM everytime you want to write English , SCIM has an English mode

Also ctrl+space will disable SCIM.

but I understand that in Ubuntu SCIM conflicts with Skype because of some shared libs or something and I suspect that it might be the im-switch that causes the problem because SCIM certainly works well with Skype on Fedora.

[in_lab]

Thanks for the help everyone. I haven't decided which one, but I will try one of these two options.

Battosai, what solution did you use?

[Battosai]

I used the im-switch on several machines

It's a very quick and elegant solution, but I think it might conflict with Skype (and possibly VMware) . It is merely speculation though , there some people who cannot get Skype to run and it seems that many of them have SCIM installed , since my Fedora runs SCIM and Skype smoothly , I suspect it might be the im-switch. But I'm not sure...

It is quite possible that Skype and SCIM would work well on your box and that my speculation is wrong.

[chrix]

I have ubuntu on a Dell mini with an impossibly small HD and have installed SCIM.

I am bit confused by it, the ZhuYin and ZhuYin Big input methods do not give you any meaningful characters as I can see. Anyone can tell me more about how these methods are used (in the meantime I've found Chewing and it works fine, but still puzzled about ZhuYin).

Also, SCIM is not working with my OpenOffice, but I'm afraid this problem wouldn't be solvable without a lot of detailed fiddling... so I'll just keep cut and pasting from gedit (maybe I'm wrong about this, then I'd appreciate some guidance).

[renzhe]

Try adding these to your standard shell (should be ~/.bashrc, I'm not sure if Ubuntu does something different):

declare -x GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"

declare -x QT_IM_MODULE="scim"

declare -x XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"

Alternatively, try executing these in a shell, and then starting oowriter from the same sheell and see whether it helps. It works just fine in OpenOffice here, so it's probably a minor thing to solve.

I'm not sure about the Zhuyin frontend, there are so many frontends for SCIM, and not all of them are very good. The smart pinyin is decent, and has a decent corpus for words, but it's not as good as Sougou or Google's input method.

[chrix]

I did what you told me to try and what it does is that unlike before the SCIM panel becomes accessible, i.e. you can switch around between different methods, but whenever I try to actually type Chinese or Japanese stuff using those methods, only Roman characters appear

[renzhe]

Maybe try:

declare -x OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP="gnome"

That's everything OpenOffice and SCIM-related that I have.

SCIM and OpenOffice often don't cooperate perfectly, so it's not a new issue. But here it works really great. I had issues, and one of those solved it. Don't know which.

[chrix]

Tried that, didn't work either, but thanks though.

I guess I'd need to do some upgrades, but the HD only has 70 MB free capacity left...

[cababunga]

See if this page is of any help:

http://www.scim-im.org/wiki/faq/gtk_gnome/why_i_can_not_input_with_scim_under_openoffice_oo

And there is also this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=562624

On a related note, if you are so space restricted, have you tried AbiWord?

[chrix]

hey, thanks for the links. I'll try the suggestions there.

Well, I've heard about abiword, but I'm told it's not compatible to MS Word?

[cababunga]

Not that it doesn't completely understand Word files. It does actually OK job up to certain complexity of the document. But yes, if you have to import file with some tricky layout, then there is a very good chance you won't even be able to read it all. (In my experience. Official point of view here http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Microsoft_Word_documents)

[Ninja]

iBus is much easier to get started than SCIM and works perfectly for Chinese input - you will find it under

System > Preferences > iBus Preferences

To have iBus autostart at login:

System > Preferences > Startup Applications

and add the iBus daemon

Name: iBus daemon

Command: /usr/bin/ibus-daemon -d