Japanese Input in Kubuntu Edgy with Scim and Anthy.

After installing Kubuntu Edgy Eft in my laptop I was surprised to see that scim with the anthy (Japanese IM Engine) was not installed even when I selected Japanese as primary language during the GUI installation.

Well not to despair because enabling japanese input support is very easy.

1) Install the scim-anthy package

# sudo aptitude install scim-anthy

This package gives us the anthy IM Engine that is my prefered one for Japanese input. You are free to install other IM Engines for japanese or other languages like Chinese and Korean.

Aptitude will take care of the dependencies and will automatically install scim if it is not already installed apart from other packages.

2) Set up environment variables on X startup.

Create a file called "74custom-scim_startup" inside the /etc/X11/Xsession.d directory and write the following inside it:

export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"
export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"
export XIM_PROGRAM="scim -d"
export QT_IM_MODULE="scim"

The QT_IM_MODULE environment variable causes Skype to crash on startup with a glibc invalid pointer error. Read my previous blog for a work around to this problem.

3) Running scim on KDE startup.

Other blogs and posts about this recommend to create a startscim script in the Autostart directory of KDE to run scim when KDE starts. I have found that this is not required if you use skim (scim for KDE). Simply run skim and you are done. Skim always gets started at KDE startup (at least on my machine).


Some links with more information:

Scim in Ubuntu guide: I used this guide to set up my laptop and to write this blog post.
Scim Home Page: With a lot of more information about scim and other IM engines.