How do I enter characters of another language?

Hi,

I haven't actually seen one in the KDE version that comes with MDK 9.1, however if you go to http://apps.kde.com/ and type "keyboard" in the search field, there will be plenty there to have a look at.

Cheers,

John

If you configure your keyboard in KDE to support different layouts (for english and chinese, for example) you can use the secondary layout by holding down ALTGR and typing that key.

It did the trick for me, and now I can type romanian special characters.

Oh, this setting is found somewhere in KDE control panel (under keyboard, i think!)

Hi I want to join this tread.

I'm using MDK 9.1 and totally agree that Windows is mils ahead with regard to Chinese or other Asian input method.
I was using MDK 9.0 and the Chinese worked fine after installing Dynasoft YCXB, my local profile is normally English, and sometimes I need to input Chinese ( I can only write about 1000 ) without having to switch to a Chinese profile like in Windoze 2000 no problem in an English installation to use Chinese Input.
MDK is going backwards if they want to make impact in the Chinese Market, then they need to improve the Chinese, as Windoze are many miles ahead with regard to the Multi language.

Does anybody know how to get the Chinese to work in MDK 9.1 ?

I have installed everything , and followed the instructions above, but still I can not get it to work. I get errors when trying to start xcin in the terminal.

This is the error " xcin: locale "en_US" encoding "iso-8859-1"
xcin: error: /etc/chinese/xcin/xcinrc:
locale section "en_US": DEFAULT_IM: value not specified "

To complicated. MDK 9.1 works very well as long you don't need multi language support..

Help...

I will say much better to dual boot to Windows 2000 that is what I'm doing, as I can not get the Chinese input system to work, and nor can anybody else here in China in MDK 9.1 - MDK 9.0 works 100% with Dynasoft YCBX installed you can still use the Chinese input system even you are in English.

JDW I want to ask you " su gbuser
password : [enter pword] "
xcin & kword

Does that mean if you are in English profile you can not input Chinese into openoffice or Mozilla e-mail system ?

I can still not get the Simplified Chinese input system it to work even in a 100% Chinese setup, and I have followed all of your instructions, so I'm still on Windoze dual boot for the Chinese which of cause is a pain, when some one sends Chinese e-mail and you receive this mail in Linux, you have to re-boot the system and go into Windoze just to reply in Chinese..
Well that is a little backwards when yo thing that Microsoft could do all this since the realease of Windoze 2K, in a English installation you could switch between Japanese - Simplified Chinese Big5 Chinese Korean, in fact any input system you want.
and more or less the same in MDK 9.0, but MDK 9.1 very poor with the Multi language support, most Chinese hate the MDK 9.1 and have re-installed MDK 9.0

Hope some one can help me....

Hi Otto,

My name is John btw, thanks for your questions. When I did the threads on how to set up simplified Chinese in mandrake I was using either MDK 9.0 or 8.2, which worked great, and hey presto, MDK 9.1 threw me completely as it obviously has for many others in China and around the world.

Firstly, there was no locale for GB2312 that I could find, but it's been renamed as zh_CN, not zh_CN.GB2312. xcin needs the GB2312 locale to input Simp Chinese (I read in some xcin group posting somewhere that Unicode input is been looked at - correct me if I am mistaken but that would make life easier).

Using the same method described above, change any reference to zh_CN.GB2312 to zh_CN in the .bashrc file, and this I have found actually works. The only problem is that instead of the nice grey/red character input window I used to get, I now get a little blue one that ONLY lets me enter one character at a time, which is very inefficient for entering a largely bisyllabic language like modern Chinese. (Anyone know how to fix that?).

awtoc123 wrote : -
This is the error " xcin: locale "en_US" encoding "iso-8859-1"
xcin: error: /etc/chinese/xcin/xcinrc:
locale section "en_US": DEFAULT_IM: value not specified "

This is because you are trying to start xcin in the english_US locale environment - so, if you follow the steps in my posting above to create a "gb" user, you can fire up Konsole (my terminal choice), and then do the following :-

su gbuser
password : [enter pword] "
xcin & [application name, e.g. kword]

and that terminal session will be running as the "gb" user...type

$ locale

to check that the locale settings are all zh_CN.

I have not tried Chinese input with OOffice or Mozilla email, but now you've got me started on a mission again I guess that I will have a try at tonight after I get home from work (no Linux PC's here in the Blight :-(

Personally, I think MDK9.1 is a great release overall, but you're right - the multi-lingual support needs work if it is to match it with Win2000/XP or even Red Hat 8.1 which I've tried (Chinese input on that is easy). However, I am a MDK believer and I am sure that they will also take the potentially huge Chinese market into consideration.

Perhaps we should bring these (very important) issues to the attention of the MDK developers...I will have a look into that tonight...
Cheers,

JDW

Hi JDW Many thanks for your long reply, and for taking so much time to try to solve the issue.

MDK 9.1 is a great disapointment here in China, most Chinese are going back to either Windoze2000 or MDK 9.0, as MDK 9.1 totally fail to supply a good Chinese input system. The Dynasoft YCBX in MDK 9.0 was even better than that of Windoze2000, but now I have send mote than 10 mails to Dynasoft regarding the issue, and no reply.
The Chinese input system in MDK 9.1 can not be used for anything, as it is to difficult and you have to switch user, and it will not work in Mozilla.
Perhaps the developer of MDK 9.1 should know this, that so far the Chiense Input system is concerned they have gone backwards, and MDK 8.0 - MDK 8.1 - MDK 9.0 had a great future in China, so you can understand that the Chinese is very dissapointed.
RH 8.3 I will try to install it - can RH 8.3 use the same disk partitions as MDK 9.1 ? I'm refering to /home

Again many thanks for your time, try to look into the Dynasoft YCBX that works with RH and MDK 9.0 that is great..

Best Regards
Otto

If you use KDE and want to add a little icon on the taskbar to switch multiple languages:

1) Open Control Centre
2) Go to Peripherals > Keyboard
3) Tick 'Enable keyboard layouts'
4) Select the languages you want to add
5) Apply,

Voila!

The only thing is that you need your system to support the languages you selected. You can add language support during installation or later if you want.

hmmm.. not quite voila at all!

I'm trying to switch around in 4 different languages and things are REALLY messed up. ---> Red Hat 9 using KDE (default is gnome).

I still can't get any of the languages to run right. ok, during RH install I picked English, French and Russian (I want to add Spanish but I can't now - don't know where to do it!). Fine. That was the least of my problems to pick out the keyboard switching because I had other issues with RH, which I won't go into here.

Anycase, I switched from the default Gnome to KDE (more comfortable with KDE). I tried using the "Control Center --> Regional & Accessibility --> Keyboard Layout" and selected English US as the default and then checked off French and Russian keyboards (alternate). I get a little "US" icon appearing in the taskbar.

Here's the problem. ANYTHING I type is now in Russian even when the icon is "US". What gives??? I click the US icon and it switches to RU and I still can ONLY type in Russian. ???

The only way I can get to type in English again is by removing all the "alternate" keyboards.

I have the same problem with Chinese ( Simplified ) input system, in MDK 9.0 It worked better than Windows using a thirth party software Dynasoft, but that dosent work with MDK 9.1, and there is so many errors in the International setting files missing , and files with wrong names, and even after you install all files, and re-name the wrong files it still doesen't work, so I give up, and re-installed Windows on one of our workstations that works with Chinese perfect.. Why Linux can not create a good Chinese input system I don't know ? Why can Microsoft do it in Windows 2000 or XP the Chinese works perfect, even from totally English configuration yuo can still use the simplified input system, we are not Chinese, so we prefere the English desktop, but as we can type in Chinese we need the inpuit system, and that the developer from Mandrake can not understand,
I received an e-mail with the most complicated instructions, to get the Chinese input system to work, in Windows only two boxes need to ticked, and bingo it works.
Linux want to get into the Chinese market ( 1.3 Billion people )
But the Chinese can not use the Linux Chinese input system, so the revert back to Windows. Pitty!! We had to re-instal windows on three workstations.

If you need Chinese just give up I can tell you it will not work, or wait for MDK 9.2 to see if the is better.

Hi again,

For Mandrake 9.1, give Free Chinese Input Tools For X (fcitx) a try. This is MUCH easier to set up and use than either chinput or xcin, and I have tested it with Open Office, KOffice, Evolution mail, kmail, mozilla mail etc. etc. - works brilliantly with all these apps as far as I can tell. The pinyin input is the "intelligent" one (zhineng pinyin) that remembers your own character combinations and suggests character combinations.

It would be nice if the developers could add Simplified Cangjie as an input method, but it has QuWei and WuBi as alternate input methods that would be perhaps easier than pinyin input for native Chinese users. I'm not sure about that though, in mainland China perhaps everyone is taught pinyin at school.


The homepage is at :

www.fcitx.org/en.htm

There are instructions on this page, however they seem to apply for a Chinese-only system, the easiest thing to do for an English (or other language) system is create a Chinese user and access fcitx and client apps from a terminal window when necessary.

A big round of applause to the developers of this software, it makes typing Chinese in Mandrake 9.1 a pleasure! Well done guys!

I hope this can restore your faith in MDK 9.1 a little bit...

Best Regards,

John

Hi all,

I am here because I face lots of issue in MDK 9.1 when trying to put up the system with Chinese input. I installed my MDK9.1 with simplified chinese and english. When I set the locale to Simplified Chinese with LocaleDrake, yeah, everything in KDE has been translated into Chinese. However, when I hit the Ctrl-space keys, the Chinput box never come out. I used chinput before in RedHat9.0 and it worked perfectly. Here in MDK9.1, the Chinput input window just never appear. I check the process and the chinput is running. In a terminal, I type export and all the variables have been set to gb2312.

Has anybody tried Chinput in MDK9.1 successfully? I wonder why the Chinput that comes together with the distro CDs is not working properly.

As recommended by JDW (thanks), I tried fcitx too, and the program seems working. I pressed Ctrl-space and the input box appears, but when i try to enter some thing, the box will not display any chinese character, although when i pressed space, some chinese characters are entered into the desinated windows, like KWrite. It seems that the input window's font cannot display chinese character.

Besides, fcitx does not have Simplified Cangjie, which makes me still prefer Chinput. but worst is, Chinput is not working MDK9.1. What a mess? It's a big headache that drive me to shift back to WinXP, but I tried not to.

So, anybody can advice?

Hi yokel we are 100% in the same boat everything you have I have the same, I have tried & tried, but can not get it to go, we also have gone back to WIN2K for our workstations, as we need Simplified Chinese, I have downloaded MDK 9.2 RC2 and still I can not get the Chinese Input system to work, so I will wait untin the full version is out to see how that works, if to many problems we will go back to RedHat 9.0 like you said that works without to much fiddling, why it has to be so complicated to install I don't know.
Like in Windows you can install in 100% english, and just make two ticks in the regional settings, and BINGO you have Chinese input working very nice.

I have been on this tread for almost one year, and have spent about two months writing back and forth to the developer ( Who is Spanish and do not speak or write Chinese ) and I followed all instructions, which was very complicated, and still it is not working. So don't hold your hope up.

Hi Yokel,

I got Chinput to work in MDK 9.1, and it worked ok, but I could not get it to work with every mail & word processing program - I'm sure fiddling around with settings would fix that though, but hey, who has time for everything? From memory it worked very well with Open Office, but didn't with the Koffice or Kmail apps...

The reason I found fcitx to be so good was that I am a native English speaker so I find using Pinyin input to be the easiest/fastest way to go. Fcitx works superbly on my system, I don't have any problems with the input character window...I have typed out some long essays and stories etc. in Chinese without a single problem.
I have recently tried another input system called SCIM (from the Turbolinux website - link below), however I couldn't get it to install, too many unresolved conflicts, missing libraries etc. I think that is in a state of development still, but I can't wait for that one, it is Unicode based but I don't know what input methods it supports because I couldn't get it going!

I agree with you concerning Trad/Simp Cangjie, it is an input method that I would like to learn (my keyboard has all the Cangjie characters on it), and it is a pity that fcitx doesn't have it.

One thing I noticed though in your post, you said the locale export settings sere set to gb2312, MDK 9.1 doesn't use that locale setting as such since 9.1, just a simple zh_CN for all the settings will do the trick (which is the GB2312 locale encoding anyway, just with a new name). E.g. export LANG=zh_CN.
Maybe that will solve the problem with the input window.

Hope that helps!

Also, if you enjoy Cangjie input, don't forget to give jmcce a try in console mode (CTRL + ALT + Fn), that seems to be ok...

In the last hope, I tried to install miniChinput (miniChinput-0.1.9-2mdk.i586.rpm), and it worked! I use LocaleDrake to set the language to Chinese Simplified, and miniChinput allows me to enter Chinese characters in all applications, including OpenOffice, KWrite and so on. And I have also put in the simplified cangjie input method myself, and glad to say that it worked out as expected.

As I prefered English menu interface, but in Simplified Chinese locale, all menu items are in chinese. so, what i do is, i go to KDE control center, in the country and language setting, I added in the English US language, and re-login, then all the KDE menus and some applications are back to English, though certain applications like GIMP is still in chinese interface. I can still activate Chinput to enter chinese character. And that's almost close to what i can do in WinXP.

This retrieve my faith with MDK, but I still have to find ways to overcome some other bugs, for example, in konqueror, when i clicked the /mnt folder, the konqueror will hang. i cannot even kill this konqueror process, and what i can do is restart the system. during the shutdown process, i noticed that when the system is unmounting the filesystem, an error message shows "device or resource busy,...".

wow, thx GOD i found this post.

ok, i can see the xcin running but.... i can't change the input language, in windows if i press ctrl+spc i can change from chinese to english. how to set this in linux?