Linux uers - SCIM and IBUS

WillBuckingham

July 14, 2009, 01:51 PM posted in General Discussion

Hi, Folks,

I'm just wondering if there are any Linux users out there who can advise me. I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop, and have been using SCIM to input Chinese, but SCIM seems a bit creaky, and occasionally does odd things, eating up my system resources, and demanding a re-install. IBus (http://code.google.com/p/ibus/) looks promising as an alternative, and certainly seems prettier, but I can't seem to get it working. Anybody out there managed to get IBus installed on their machine? And if so, is it a worthy replacement for SCIM.

Thanks,

Will

WillBuckingham

July 16, 2009, 07:04 AM

This is a geek alert. Feel free to ignore this, but if you are a Linux user, it may be helpful.

After a bit of faffing around, I have just got IBus working, and it seems to work well. 我觉得 IBus 比 SCIM 很好很漂亮。It's certainly far prettier than SCIM, and it doesn't eat into my system resources in the same way. There may be a few problems that become apparent down the line, but I'm happy with it at the moment.

For any Ubuntu users wanting to give it a go (it's not yet default in Ubuntu, as it is, I think, in Fedora), first you'll need to completely remove SCIM from your system (go to synaptic, search for SCIM under installed apps, remove all SCIM-related gubbins). If you change your mind later, you can reinstall SCIM.

Failing to remove SCIM seems to have been the problem I had in getting it up and running before. Once SCIM is removed, then you can install IBus. You can do this automatically using Ubuntu Tweak. And hopefully, after logging out and in again, it should work. If not, you may need to run the following command in your terminal to set ibus as the IME

im-switch -s ibus

OK. Enough gibberish for one morning. But, as I said, it may be helpful to somebody out there.

matt_c

July 16, 2009, 09:33 AM

I just asked Sunix at Praxis and he used SCIM when he was using Linux, we did a search for Ibus and apparently it is still in BETA stage. No reports on it's usability. Sorry I couldn't help you beyond that.

Matt