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Old 01-24-2010, 07:53 PM   #1
mejohnsn
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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.
 
Old 01-24-2010, 10:37 PM   #2
David the H.
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This page should help you. It's a detailed explanation of multi-language support in Linux.

http://www.jw-stumpel.nl/stestu.html

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.
 
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Old 01-25-2010, 12:51 AM   #3
mejohnsn
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Quote:
Originally Posted by David the H. View Post
This page should help you. It's a detailed explanation of multi-language support in Linux.

http://www.jw-stumpel.nl/stestu.html

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)?
 
Old 01-25-2010, 01:36 AM   #4
mejohnsn
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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?
 
Old 01-25-2010, 03:04 PM   #5
mejohnsn
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Originally Posted by mejohnsn View Post
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.

So this problem is now solved.
 
  


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