SCIM Not Working

Pariksheet Nanda pariksheet.nanda at gmail.com
Sat May 24 18:18:24 CEST 2008


Hi Das,

SCIM is started up based on the following shell environment variables:
XMODIFIERS, GTK_IM_MODULE and QT_IM_MODULE

Note that these variables have to be set *early* in your X-session
initialization routine so, for Xfce, it wouldn't work if you simply
put them in ~/.xinitrc. They would have to go in
/etc/profiles.d/scim.sh or similar (I'm not sure if that is a valid
path on Fedora though... it works for me on Gentoo :)

These are the values of I have setup my SCIM program...
$ cat /etc/profiles.d/scim.sh
export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM    #case matters for this variable!
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim-bridge
export QT_IM_MODULE=scim-bridge


My guess would be that after upgrading to Fedora 9, the 'im-chooser'
GUI option does not write the above env vars to such a path (or maybe
it doesn't write them at all).

> After the Gedit experience I installed Gnome things with 'yum
> groupinstall gnome-desktop' and I am getting SCIM properly there,
> everything OK. But, I want XFCE.
>
> Am I doing something wrong, something has changed in Fedora 9 version
> of XFCE? Or, is it some problem?

But it is interesting that they work in Gnome...I don't know why that
is.  You probably would want to file a bug with your distribution
explaining that it works in Gnome but not Xfce.

> ...In Gedits context menu,
> there is one option for choosing input method, and after I choose
> SCIM there from the default 'system', the switch is working.

Yes, this way manually launches SCIM.

> ...But, then again when I log out
> and come back to XFCE with 'startx', again I have to do the same thing
> in Gedit context menu. Though all this type the SCIM icon is there on
> the task bar. And it is working as it should, that is the usual context
> menu with the left click, but not the usual keyboard list with the
> right click.

This is because the scim daemon is still running, continuing from
closing your last xfce session and opening a new one, but it has not
been initialized correctly with the env vars I mentioned above.

For now try writing the /etc/profiles.d/scim.sh file (or similar) like
I have. You probably would have to change "scim-bridge" to "scim" or
whatever SCIM IM-client you are using. See if that fixes your problem.
 If it does then add that point to your bug report.

> das

-Pariksheet



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