newbie: dapper: skim and latin characters

[Christian Fröbel]

Hi there,

I'm a long time SuSE user and now I'm trying Kubuntu for the first time. I 
freshly installed the 6.06 LTS RC1 version. I chose English language and 
English keyboard layout. However, I'd like to input all kinds of latin 
characters, especially German umlauts.

On SuSE (with KDE), there was some kind of prefix input system, e. g. 
typing "o gives german umlaut ö, or Alt Gr+s gives ß (I switched to German 
keyboard layout to input these characters). Back then I didn't care how it 
worked, it just did.

I tried to figure out how it is supposed to work with Kubuntu. I read 
something about scim and skim. I searched the internet sites, the package 
descriptions and so on but couldn't find anything of real use.

I installed almost all packages related to scim and skim, such as skim, scim, 
scim-uim, scim-m17n and so on. I started skim and got an applet icon in the 
panel. From there I worked my way to the configuration dialog. Most of the 
options there don't mean anything to me. But I noticed a long list of 
IMEngines. Among them something like UIM-latin, which sounds promising.

I went on to try it out. In the KMail composer I right-cliked in the edit 
field. In the "Select Input Method" menu I selected scim. Then I tried out 
several IMEngines (including UIM-latin). I got a lot of Japanese and other 
characters but nothing close to German umlauts.

Also there are no descriptions of the IMEngines. I couldn't even find some 
docs in the internet. Maybe UIM-latin is the right one, but how does it work?

BTW: In the KDE menu "Select Input Method" the default is XIM. What is this 
anyway? Obviously there are the two different systems; scim and XIM. Which is 
the right one to go with? Where can I set the default input method used by 
kde/qt?

Thanks for your time.

regards,
  Christian