De Purple Flute

It has been 3 days since my last blog due to I have been busy toying around with Fedora9 ;).

Fedora9 just released a month ago, it is hell a lot nicer and friendly compare to previous version. I used the Fedora9 English version which cause a problem when I try to chat with friends in Chinese. What I see is only square and funny characters and I have no tools for input method. So I fired up my research cap and would like to share the findings to setup Chinese Input-Method. The answer is to install Smart Common Input Method (SCIM) and its very simple to setup, take me less than 5 minutes to get it up and running. Make sure you are connected to Internet before going through these steps.

1. Make sure you are root user either using su or sudo command.
2. Open your terminal and use yum to install. Type : yum install scim-pinyin. Installation is automated!
3. We create a symbolic link. Type : ln -s /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim /etc/alternatives/xinput-xinput-en_US.
4. We edit our profile using vi editor. Type : vi ~/.bash_profile.
5. We ask Fedora to run scim at startup by adding this to bash_profile’s get the aliase and functions section.
   if [ - /etc/scim ]; then
   . /usr/bin/scim -d
   fi
6. We must setup the envinronmnet parameter for SCIM to start by adding this to bash_profile.
   LC_CTYPE=”zh_CN.utf8″
   XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
   GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
   QT_IM_MODULE=scim
7. We then need to export these parameters add this to bash_profile
   export PATH LC_CTYPE XMODIFIERS GTK_IM_MODULE QT_IM_MODULE
8. OK we are done. Now Logout and Login again. SCIM will now showing itself in your desktop system tray. (Top right of your screen)
9. To enable Chinese-input, click on scim icon on the desktop system tray and select the pinyin or other method you fond of.
10. Lastly start chit chat with me and friends in Chinese :D.

Here is some extra information for those who like to know more. You can change the scim configuration such as hot key, to enable smart pinyin option, etc by using scim GUI. Simply right click on the SCIM icon on the system tray and select SCIM setup. The GUI is really nice and self explanatory.

SCIM can also configure to display and input Japanese and Korean Language. To do that just change the LC_CTYPE variable to your prefered locality. In order to know what locality to use, you can use the command locale -a to list all the locality already installed in your system.