Friday, February 11, 2011

Typing Chinese in Sabayon5.5

I was trying out Sabayon, and as usual, one of the first things I would like to set up is to configure SCIM to type Chinese.

Speaking of which, Sabayon interested me for a few reasons.  It's based on Gentoo; every Linux user thought Gentoo is cool. While I didn't have the patient go through the installation of Gentoo, trying Sabayon seems to make a lot of sense. Just like I've been using LinuxMint instead of Ubuntu,  I love these distros because they just "works" after initial installation.   Even more, Sabayon has two powerful package managers - emerge and equo.  emerge uses Gentoo's infamous portage system to build packages straight from source, while equo provides package managers to install from pre-compiled binaries, just like yum in Fedora and apt in Ubuntu.  equo is fast, while emerge gives me the cutting edge versions instead of waiting others to pre-compil the binaries.  I've no complain.

To install scim and Chinese input methods (倉頡 is one of them), use the following command:
equo scim scim-tables

To make scim as default input method, put following lines to ~/.profile:
export XMODIFIERS='@im=SCIM'
export XIM="scim"
export XINPUT="xim"
export XIM_PROGRAM="scim -d"
export GTK_IM_MODULE="xim"
export QT_IM_MODULE="xim"
scim -d &

Now, restart X( by logout login again, or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace), then Ctrl-space, there should be the SCIM toolbar somewhere on your screen, then choose your favourite input method to use it.

And try the WenQuanYi Bitmap Song CJK Font, it is the best Chinese font I've seen.
equo install  wqy-bitmapfont

1 comment:

zip said...

zip...

[...]Typing Chinese in Sabayon5.5 « Gideon’s blog[...]...