[SCIM] Re: From a newbie: problems in running scim

[Yukiko Bando]

Hello,

On Monday 10 January 2005 01:11, Rodolfo Medina wrote:

> This time I tried with Mandrake 10.1 Community.
> I put those lines you indicated in ~/.i18n
> and edited /usr/local/etc/scim/global as you showed,
> and the following problems occurred:

Sorry to hear that you are still having problems ... 

> 1) accented italian characters (à, ì, etc) not displayed within directories
> names;

As Mike said, I think your directories names were encoded as ISO-8859-1, which  
seems to be the default encoding for Italian in Mandrakelinux.  If LC_CTYPE 
is set to UTF-8, they are garbaged...   
 
> 2) the same characters not input from keyboard;

Have you updated your system after installing 10.1 Community?  Qt3-3.3.3 
included in it had couple of problems and dead keys didn't work.  The current 
version for 10.1 CE is 3.3.3-27.1.101mdk. 

> 3) when opening a shell the following message appears:
> locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
> locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
> locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

My guess is that you don't have locales-ja (or locales-it) installed on your 
system ... 

> 4) I run scim with '$ scim', then open kwrite and do Ctrl-c,
>    and the scim toolbar appears: but only English/European input method
>    is present.

With 'XIM_PROGRAM="scim -d"' and 'XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM' in ~/.i18n, I don't 
need to do '$ scim' in konsole.  I start Qt applications from the menu or by 
clicking icons, press Ctrl+Space, then SCIM input methods become available. 

> P.S.: How did you select scim input method in localedrake?
>       It only asks me for language and country.

Click 'Other countries', then you'll see 'Input method' and be able to select 
SCIM from the dropdown menu. :) 

---------
BTW, I installed man-pages-it and found out that accented characters were 
shown as diamonds if LC_CTYPE is set to it_IT.UTF-8 in the current cooker 
too.  Maybe Mandrakelinux doesn't fully support it_IT.UTF-8 yet ... :(

So, I would suggest the following as a workaround. 

1. Firstly, update your system to get the latest version of Qt3.
2. Select Italian as the language and Italy as the country (if you live there, 
of course) and SCIM as the input method.  Unless you chose Unicode at the 
time of installation, I think LANGUAGE, LANG and LC_* in ~/.i18n will be set 
to it_IT (alias for it_IT.ISO-8859-1).   
3. Since LC_CTYPE is not set to UTF-8, SCIM input methods don't work in Qt 
applications.  So, when you use SCIM in those apps, you need to do this:

$ export LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (or en_US.UTF-8)
$ kwrite

If I were you, I would make scripts for all Qt apps in which I use SCIM as 
below, make them executable and click on them.  I don't want to open 
konsole and type commands to start programs ...  

#!/bin/sh
export LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8
kwrite

I really hope you'll get SCIM working soon.

Regards,
Yukiko