I wish to: keeping my system s language as english, have the ability to do some text input in chinese when the need arises.
So I set out to install SCIM (scim.freedesktop.org) which seems the modern and elegant solution!
I found many nice tutorials , everyone shares roughly the same advice:
http://www.jiawen.net/linuxbits.html (Mandrake)
and
http://nic-nac-project.de/~murj/blog...system/catid/5
Described most what I want to do:
http://www.erning.net/en_US/archives/000003.html (Fedora)

What I'd rather not have to do: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...highlight=SCIM

http://gerrit-worldwide.de/chinesischlinux2_eng.html#5 (Mandrake)<--is well-detailed

The only troublesome part is when it comes to specifying your locale info -
that seems to be very distribution-dependant

it has to remain as it was - the usual en_GB.UTF-8 for me -
everywhere except for

LC_CTYPE which must become = to zh_CN.UTF-8 for simplified chinese,

and the following lines of magic (which i understand must be ""exported"" to the environment) for SCIM to be able to do its job:

CONSOLE_NOT_LOCALIZED=yes
XIM_PROGRAM=scim
XMODIFIERS="@im=scim"

Question 1: I must be doing this wrong because every distro seems to have a different way about it , and I havent found The Debian Way for this.

Why do I think this is what Im doing wrong?
Because when I log into the gdm having chosen "Language" as Chinese, then
the SCIM works like a charm, whereas if I use the English language it only offers me the "English" input method, which is of little use

I installed SCIM with the .deb packages, I'm using Gnome on Sarge, my kernel is 2.4.21 in case that matters..and: I made the locale settings by putting the following in my
~/.bashrc:
<-------SNIP----------->
XIM=scim
export XIM

XMODIFIERS="@im=scim"
export XMODIFIERS


LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE

CONSOLE_NOT_LOCALIZED="yes"
export CONSOLE_NOT_LOCALIZED
<------SNIP------------>

What puzzles me most is that when I login with language "English", SCIM starts at login then I cant kill it. When i start with Chinese language, it doesnt launch by itself at login, and I start it from a console and there it works fine.
It s very difficult to have 2 usable SCIM's running at the same time, so since I cant kill the one that autolaunches when i login in with english language, I cant really test ...

Question 2:

what kind of configuration file for X, gnome or whatever in my debian sarge ,
can cause this language-dependant launching-or-not-of-an-app-at-login ??
i really want to find out where that auto-launch line is so I can remove it!

Thanks

I have precisely the same prob on a Mandrake Linux OS, despite RTFMs & trying for hours to find the correct configuration.
So i'd say this is not a 100% distro-related problem.

Laoniu please have a look at this updated post

老牛，我不是用debian， 不过我成功将scim启动在我的suse里。

在 .bashrc 里加上，

export LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.gb2312"

就可以了。
如果要在英文的菜单里谁时启动scim就按 control - space。
这就是用scim打的。

good advice damienduff, and you can also use zh_CN.UTF-8 for LC_CTYPE with SCIM. I am not an expert, but I would imagine that Unicode allows you to switch between traditional Chinese/Korean/Japanese etc. in the same document if so required...

jdw

hi JDW,
appreciate ur help few mths back when i was trying to make xcin work.
i finally found the above solution tat is so simple n beautiful on the internet with a little bit of luck.

i m guessing
export LC_CTYPE="zh_CN.gb2312" or export LC_CTYPE="zh_TW.Big5"
will work on xcin as well, no need to create a separate chinese account.

Hi,

Yeah, I made a separate user account just for convenience, but seeing your post gave me the idea to set up an alias in ~/.bashrc, as follows :-

alias scim="export LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.UTF-8; export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM; scim -d"

Now when I type "scim" at the command line everything works just fine with a minimum hassle factor...

cheers,

jdw

http://yienbin.diong.org/?post=5
take a look at this.