Hi guys

I am running slackware 14.1. I have uninstalled scim in favor of Ibus which i installed from slackbuilds. Ibus works but the problem is it doesn't show any indian languiages or any central asian or russian.It only shows chinese,japanese,korean. So I tried to install ibus-m17n, m17n-db packages but didn't find any slackbuilds so I had to use deb2tgz to convert the deb files to tgz packages and install it.It didn't work. So help me guys.

Is it just iBus? Are your web browsers displaying Indian languages properly?

If not, there might just need to install the fonts that have the needed characters:

https://www.google.com/get/noto/

Unarchive them and put the TTFs (and OTFs if there are any) into ~/.local/share/fonts, then run "fc-cache -f -v".

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In addition to what dugan said, a handy table comes here: http://www.utf8-chartable.de/ You can use it to check the availability of the needed glyphs changing the font in Firefox.

I don't know if this table has been updated to stay in sync with Unicode 8.0.0: http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode8.0.0/ but probably you don't need the additional characters in this release.

I remind you that pressing together then releasing Ctrl+Shift+u then typing the digits of the Unicode code points then pressing [Enter] displays the glyph if available in some text editors like geany, and also in editing a post like this one in Firefox.

Thanks for the reply dugan and didier spaier. Firefox displays Indian languages with no problems. I have also installed fonts for Indian languages. The problem is with Ibus only. It doesn't display any Indian languages in the preferences. Also according to some other forums the installation of Ibus-m17n package will solve the problem but in slackware there is no such package in slackbuild or in any official channel and i had to install the debian binary using deb2tgz but still it didn't work.

Also ctrl+shift+u didn't do anything.

AFAIK input methods are mostly useful for ideographic languages like CJK. Do you really need that for Indian languages, central asian ones or Russian that are alphabetic ones and include not that many characters?

Just a reminder, under X using the default evdev driver that applies the RMLVO (Rules, Model, Layout, Variant, Options) template you can set your keybord(s) to any combination of values found in /etc/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst.

You can have several keyboard layouts. For instance you can set XkbLayout to "en,in" for English, Indian, XkbVariant to ",kan" for Kannada language and include in XkbOptions grp:<something> and possibly lv3:<something> to choose your way of switching keyboard layouts and possibly how to choose 3rd level.

About ctrl+shift+u: in this editor pressing them together displays u (as in Unicode), then typing the digits one at a time then pressing [Enter] displays the relevant glyph if available. This is how I have put the "grinning cat face with heart shaped eyes" (U+1F63B) in my signature. Here[1] the cat face is smiling instead (U+1F638): 😸

[1]Can be saved here only if this editor is in advanced mode due to a bug already reported to Jeremy @LQ.

PS The settings used for X can also be used in a framebuffer, provided that the framebuffered terminal also uses the RMLVO scheme, through the libxkbcommon library. This is the case for instance of kmscon, provided by @ http://slackbuilds.org

Didier, keyboard layout can be changed to use my language i.e Tamil [English is my second language] but it is difficult to type fast and that's why i like to have ibus which gives me phonetic translation.

Thanks for the info on grinning cat, never knew about that.