Chinese user setup

[Loïc Martin]

Avraham Hanadari wrote:
> Fred Roller wrote:
>> I don't want to make presumption but have you looked at
>> System->Administration->Language Support?
>>
> 
> I was pleasantly surprised to note that I could add support for Chinese. 
> I am still limited to four keyboards in the Keyboard indicator, however. 
> English, French, German and Hebrew are currently there, but Ubuntu will 
> not allow me to add Arabic and Chinese.
> 
> More to the point in this thread, how am I to input Chinese? It used to 
> be via the SCIM input method. Should I go that way now?


System->Administration->Language Support then enable "Use input methods 
engines (IME) to enable complex characters" will activate SCIM input for 
the user. Then in SCIM, provided you installed all support for Chinese 
(to simplify, since it's actually about activating entry methods, you 
could omit support files like documentation in Chinese if you didn't 
plan to use them), you'll have the ability to select the input engine 
you prefer among a few different ones.

The keyboard is another matter, there's no "Chinese" keyboard per see. 
Most use an English keyboard, but just set up the one that correspond to 
your layout, and it will work too, unlike Windows where even with a 
different layout the Chinese input method forces you to use an English 
layout (even if your layout is different). Keyboard layout just don't 
enter into the equation with modern input methods, so you don't have to 
relearn one.

Arabic might be different, I'm not sure they have to use SCIM (even 
though they could). Check you enabled all Arabic support first, then 
verify again (or use SCIM). Whatever, unless you have a keyboard with 
Arabic letters, you'd probably want to use SCIM.

For Chinese, there's always the wiki, see 
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM
I didn't update the screenshots for Ubuntu 9.04, there's not much 
difference though, and the advices should still be valid - email me 
personally (I don't always have time to skim through ubuntu-users) if 
something in the wiki doesn't work for you.

Loïc