David @ Tokyo

So what use is a computer without Japanese input?

I was using UIM before, but apparently SCIM is pretty good too so I'm giving it a shot. These input method setups seem to be changing quite a lot so probably the next time I come back to read this again it will probably all be different, but hey you never know.

$ sudo aptitude install scim scim-anthy

This gets a bunch of other package dependencies including im-switch. This package was apparently introduced so that users wouldn't need to futz around with their .xsession file or whatever to get their CJK input methods working.

I forget exactly what I did after this to get things working, but I believe it was something like this...
1) make sure you have your UTF-8 locale set up. This is one way.

$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
$

Yeah, en_US is fine, you don't need to use ja_JP.UTF-8 to get your Japanese working. UTF-8 is good.

2) fiddle with im-switch.

$ im-switch -c

There are 5 candidates which provide IM for /home/david/.xinput.d/en_US:

Selection Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
+ 1 default
2 none
3 scim
4 scim-immodule
5 th-xim
System wide default for en_US (or all_ALL) locale is marked with [+].
Press enter to keep the current selection[*], or type selection number:

Well it seems like we get a menu like this. Typing "3" here to select scim seems to do the trick.

Now shut out of your X session, and login again. When X starts up it appears to read the config files stored under /etc/X11/Xsession.d/, and included in here is now a file called 80im-switch. This script will go looking for a configuration file in your home directory at ~/.xinput.d.
Here's mine:

$ ls -lg
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 david 28 2007-12-06 23:32 en_US -> /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim

Wow, going round in circles aren't we, but if we take a look inside the file that this sym-link points to, it contains env vars like this:

XIM=SCIM
XIM_PROGRAM=/usr/bin/scim
XIM_ARGS="-d"
GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
QT_IM_MODULE=xim

If you look at the bottom of the /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80im-switch that picked up this config file, it shows that the value specified in XIM_PROGRAM is executed. All this happens when X is starting up. Passing -d to scim makes it run as a daemon apparently, and sure enough:

$ ps -ef | grep scim

... well, you get the picture, scim has been started up for us by X. Yay.

Finally, rather than use the default CTRL-Space combination to pull up the Japanese input method, you can configure scim to use the Hankaku/Zenkaku key (on a jp106 keyboard) to be the trigger instead. Other configurable stuff too:

$ scim-setup

This seems just fine for everyday use now.

Almost back to normal - just video playback / sound etc to fix now...

Labels: Debian, input method, linux

More notes for linux users (more specifically enlightenment fans)

On Debian lenny, additional packages that need to be installed to successfully do a ...

1) eet build:
zlib1g-dev
libjpeg62-dev
autoconf automake1.7 autotools-dev
libltdl3 libltdl3-dev libtool

2) evas build
pkg-config
libfreetype6-dev
libxrender-dev x11proto-render-dev

(also be sure to get this anyway, as e17 requires PNG support):
libpng12-dev

UPDATE 2008/07/20
libxext-dev
(need this to get evas to find Xext when linking... dunno when this changed)


3) e17 build
libx11-dev libxau-dev libxdmcp-dev libxext-dev x11proto-core-dev
x11proto-input-dev x11proto-kb-dev x11proto-xext-dev xtrans-dev

UPDATE: 12/18
... an addition to the e17 build requirements - an optional one. If you want to use the System -> Lock Screen function, you need pam support detected and built in. The debian lenny package that contains this is:
libpam0g-dev

Labels: enlightenment, linux

I've had some troubles with my Linux installation over the last month, but am getting on top of it now.

Being able to go back to my blog posts in March 2005 on the topic of installing Debian over the ADSL connection was surprisingly helpful (amazing how much useful information one can forget over the space of 700 days...), and so I'm going to jot some notes down again now so the next time this sort of thing happens I can once again help my future self.

1) X fails to start. /var/log/Xorg.0.log extract:

(EE) intel(0): detecting sil164
(EE) intel(0): sil164 not detected got 5: from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
compiled for 1.3.0, module version = 1.0.0
ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 1.2
(EE) intel(0): Unable to read from DVOI2C_E Slave 236.
compiled for 1.3.0, module version = 1.0.0
ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 1.2
(EE) intel(0): ivch: Unable to read register 0x00 from DVOI2C_B:04.
compiled for 1.3.0, module version = 1.0.0
ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 1.2
(EE) intel(0): tfp410 not detected got VID 1305: from DVOI2C_E Slave 112.
(EE) intel(0): No valid modes.
(EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

Fatal server error:
no screens found

This seems to be a problem with the current intel driver in xorg, but replacing intel with "vesa" gets around the problem for the mean time.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Corporation 82830 CGC [Chipset Graphics Controller]"
# Driver "intel"
Driver "vesa"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

2) Getting ntfs partition set up again (easy):

debian:~# modprobe ntfs
debian:~# mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/xphome

And in /etc/fstab (unified diff):

+/dev/hda1 /mnt/xphome ntfs ro,umask=0222,iocharset=utf8 0 0

3) Essential packages (for starters):

xdm
x-window-system
enlightenment
cvs

Labels: linux