hello!
I am looking for a way to write in amharic using Mandriva 2009 spring. Amharic is listed among the languages available, but up to now I have to use it be it on OpenOffice or any other editor, though the options of the various windows switch to amharic.
Presently I have french as main language, so I have used the Region tool in "desktop configure" and I have now the possibility to switch between french,arabic,amharic and greek. Arabic and greek work perfectly, but not Amharic: it is impossible to form the syllabic forms necessary, i.e I can type "b" but not "bä","bu","bi","bé","be","bO" which are formed by typing a vowel sign and without which it is impossible to write! No help is available from the mandriva office (!!!).
There is SCIM input method tool (no help also from Mandriva) but I don't know to use, and the information available from Mandriva release notes are for Mandriva 2008. I have also installed the "KMFL" input method which is under SCIM, but it requires knowing the name of the keyboards, which I ignore.
Can someone help me?
Many thanks
zoba

I am sorry that it has taken so long for anyone to reply to this thread.

There are a few ways to work with this problem:

You may wish to load uim. This may be easier for you to work with than SCIM. I have not tried it for Amharic.

If you have a reasonable web connexion, you can use a Firefox extension called AnyKey to start typing in Amharic on any Firefox page: ስ ሳ ሰ ሴ ሲ (note the vowels!) Then use Zoho.com (or Googledocs) for an office suite.

Good luck!