Missing m17n engines in iBus

CVAlkan · 11-14-2020, 01:03 PM

Several of the m17n engines that I've used with iBus in the past are no longer available in Linux Mint 20, among them m17n:ar:kbd, m17n:el:kbd, m17n:he:kbd, and m17n:ko:han2 (Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Korean); the details are available in a posting to the Linux Mint forum at https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtop...?f=47&t=334843, so I'll try to keep this short.

Although I am able to use PinYin for Chinese in Mint 20, a posting I found at http://www.pinyinjoe.com/linux/ubunt...nese-setup.htm suggested that in newer versions of Ubuntu and derivatives, it is necessary to generate locales in order for certain engines to become available. I seemed to already have locale definitions for some of the keyboards I was missing, and adding others made no difference. So that doesn't seem relevant.

Not unexpectedly, there have been no responses to my posting on the Mint forum, and the github page for the m17n project seems to be inactive. I was wondering if anyone here knows where I can obtain these missing engines and, if so, what I need to do to add them to my system.

Thanks for any pointers anyone can offer.

CVAlkan · 11-27-2020, 11:37 AM

After much wandering in the dark corners of the internet, I finally discovered why several of my favorite iBus keyboard definitions were missing and, more importantly, how to restore them.

Running the command:

Code:

/usr/lib/ibus/ibus-engine-m17n --xml

returns several lines similar to the following:

Code:

ibus-m17n-Message: 05:11:16.781: skipped m17n:el:kbd since its rank is lower than 0

Included among those notifications were all of my missing keyboard layouts as well as many others.

So why are they "skipped?" It seems there is a file [ /usr/share/ibus/ibus-m17n/default.xml ] that is read during startup to generate the menu entries. In that file, there is one particular stanza that reads as follows:

Code:

	<!-- Blacklist some engines -->
	<!-- kbd engines are duplicate of xkb engines -->
	<engine>
		<name>m17n:*:kbd</name>
		<rank>-1</rank>
	</engine>

So it seems from the comment that these were thought to be redundant since they are duplicates of other (xkb) engines. The only problem with this is that they are not "duplicates." They have (mostly) the same key definitions, but the similarity ends there. The xkb engines are, as I said in the original post, a bit rough around the edges (at least in my view), particularly in the interfaces a user deals with. But - that's opinion.

Luckily, as alluded to in my original posting, all of these engines (as well as their corresponding icons, etc.) were still part of the ibus-m17n package, so I was able to restore them by commenting out the stanza as shown below, and then rebooting.

Code:

<!-- 
	<engine>
		<name>m17n:*:kbd</name>
		<rank>-1</rank>
	</engine>
-->

Why the relevant engines and their support files were not removed wasn't made clear, though I assume that the ibus-m17n package was left intact, while the distro at some level (Debian?, Ubuntu?, Mint?) attempted to make things "simpler." I have decided, however, to make separate archival backups of these just in case more "help" is coming at a later date.

A discussion from 2014 (!!) at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1076945 shows that these issues are on-going. I hope this helps anyone who has run into the same issue with "missing" keyboard layouts.