[SOLVED] How to get Japanese IME Working with SCIM under Linux Mint(Gloria)?
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How to get Japanese IME Working with SCIM under Linux Mint(Gloria)?
I have what seems to be an incomplete or incompletely configured configuration of SCIM on my Netbook running Linux Mint(Gloria).
To tell the truth, I am not even sure SCIM is the best choice, since I see claims (in LQ forums) that SCIM has been discontinued, and I cannot connect to the SCIM website.
So what I want to do is get SOME Japanese Input Method working under this installation of Gloria, for now, I presume SCIM is the right choice for its front end. But I am certainly open to other suggestions.
But I must shrink from the idea of installing language support for all languages, which is what Control Center>Language Support seems to threaten to do: it is only a Netbook, I can't afford to waste that much space.
Anyway: what I see is the above Control Center option, and one other that must be relevant: ControlCenter>SCIM Input Method
Setup. But I don't see any documentation for this, and the menu item names are vaguely suggestive of their functions, not descriptive. So I am quite unsure which of them I need to use to get it working. Is it true, for example, that SCIM itself does not include the Input Methods? I have to download a Japanese IME from somewhere else? Which one? Is that what Control Center>Language Support will do? What DO they mean by "Front end module"? Why does SCIM only recognize an English keyboard layout and a "RAW CODE" (in IM Engine Global Setup)? I have Greek and Russian layouts enabled on this machine, too.
So now that you have a pretty good idea how disorienting I find the current situation, please point me to something that will clear up the confusion and possibly even give a list of step-by-step directions for getting a Japanese IME working on this machine.
It could be that you just don't have the proper backend installed, such as anthy. Scim is just the IME framework, the actual conversion engine is a separate program.
If scim doesn't work for you, try uim instead. I had to switch to it for my kde4 system because I just couldn't get scim to play nicely with it.
It could be that you just don't have the proper backend installed, such as anthy. Scim is just the IME framework, the actual conversion engine is a separate program.
If scim doesn't work for you, try uim instead. I had to switch to it for my kde4 system because I just couldn't get scim to play nicely with it.
That is an interesting and promising page. Following its advice, I see I do have the "New Input System" for Debian (on which Ubuntu & Mint are based). No surprise there. But its advice on the New Input System is somewhat equivocal: it says that in theory, we should not have to do anything, but then describes a number of edits that MAY have to be done to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
Likewise, it says first that starting in about 2006, Debian users must execute "update-locale" to force the system to default to UTF-8 (or is it Unicode?), but then also says that it will be run automatically whenever you upgrade (the distribution?)
Now rather than resolve all the ambiguities of the expressions on that page, what I would really like to believe is that all I have to do is:
1) enable the locale (currently only en_US.UTF-8)
2) install anthy (as you already suggested)
3) follow the instructions of 6.5.2 of the above document on SCIM (which already includes how to install scim-anthy)
Does that sound right?
Finally, should I really generate a locale for each of the languages I plan to use? Or can I get by with en_US.UTF-8 locale (or that plus ja_JP.UTF-8)?
Finally, should I really generate a locale for each of the languages I plan to use? Or can I get by with en_US.UTF-8 locale (or that plus ja_JP.UTF-8)?
I have to ask question like this because after installing scim-anthy, I now get anthy showing up in the SCIM setup, but I still see no way to actually use it: the only keyboard layouts showing up in SCIM
are still "English/European" and "English/Keyboard". Yet whichever I select, only "English/European" shows up on the floating panel.
All this even though Control Center>Keyboard>Layouts shows 'Japan' (among others). IN fact, this is the main thing I still don't get: why isn't SCIM looking at this for the keyboard layouts? Has it got somewhere else it gets this info from? Where?
I have to ask question like this because after installing scim-anthy, I now get anthy showing up in the SCIM setup, but I still see no way to actually use it: the only keyboard layouts showing up in SCIM
are still "English/European" and "English/Keyboard". Yet whichever I select, only "English/European" shows up on the floating panel.
Now that I rebooted the system, I have three "keyboard layouts" (not sure if this is the real SCIM term) displayed in the floating panel, "Anthy" (hurray!), "Other - English/European" and "English/Keyboard". So now I can select Anthy, and input in Japanese.
I got this working without having to touch the settings for LANG etc. in .bashrc, apparently the SCIM setup really did take care of it. And it did warn that I need to reboot before all setting take effect.
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