Japanese input method in Mepis 3.3

From MEPIS Documentation Wiki

!!! Warning! The info contained in this article pertains to older versions of MEPIS !!!
(Though old, this article is quite useful for MEPIS 7.0. Hand-configuration of steps 3, 4 and 5 should mostly work as described and all are necessary. Selection of packages in step 2 may need some thoughts, but you most likely want to include scim and anthy. In step 3, you may want to replace two lines containing IM_MODULE by export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim; export QT_IM_MODULE=xim)

Contents 1 Introduction 2 1- Update the packages 3 2.- Install the following packages. 4 3.- Make run the applications at startup. 5 4.- Control your locale 6 5.- Make run scim at login. 7 6.- Use and configuration of scim 8 7.- Optional: customize your keyboard

Introduction

This is a mini-guide for non-native writers who need to use different languages, specially those languages which need an input method. That applies specially for Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

IMPERATIVE: When installing your system, select an UTF locale.

1- Update the packages

apt-get update

2.- Install the following packages.

apt-get install scim
apt-get install scim-gtk2-immodule
apt-get install anthy
apt-get install uim-anthy
apt-get install scim-uim
apt-get install scim-m17n

NOTE: You can see the packages needed in order to write Korean, Chinese (Different types of it) or other languages: /usr/share/doc/scim/README.Debian

3.- Make run the applications at startup.

The above README file says that we need to pass some variables at X start up. Well, to do that, the same README file suggest to put some commands inside the file ~/.xssession or ~/.xinitrc, but Mepis doesn't come with those files and if we try to make one of them, the graphic session crashes without mercy or explanation. So here is a workaround.

Looking at man xsession section CUSTOMIZING THE STARTUP PROCEDURE, the magic consists in making a customized personal script to pass the needed variables. The name of the file must be as they say in the man xsession, or you risk crashing everything. Accordingly I named my scprit 75custom-write_japanese and inside put the following lines

export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"
export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"
export XIM_PROGRAM="scim -d"
export QT_IM_MODULE="scim"

The file goes to the directory /etc/X11/Xsession.d

4.- Control your locale

You need to control if scim supports your locale:

In your /etc/scim/global file the support for your locale must appear:

/SupportedUnicodeLocales = en_US.UTF-8,en_GB.UTF-8,es_ES.UTF-8

In my case the locale is en_US.UTF-8 (English) or es_ES.UTF-8 (Spanish). So we are O.K.

The same can be done in the ~/.scim/global file if you want to give each user his own locale.

5.- Make run scim at login.

To be sure that scim always starts enter in KDE, we need to do a file, named as you like (in my case: startscim) with the following lines:

#!/bin/sh 
scim -d

The file goes to .kde/Autostart/, don't forget to set the permissions:

chmod 744 startscim

6.- Use and configuration of scim

Enjoy your Japanese input system with English interface. Yukiko Bando, wrote an excellent guide, you can see it here: [1]

7.- Optional: customize your keyboard

As I need to write in Spanish and Italian the so called "dead keys" are indispensable for my daily work. So following the kind guide of Yukiko Bando, I made my own keyboard layout: Japanese 106 keys, with latinamerican layout and some other small fixes. If you are interested in it, I can send you my xmodmap file.