Bilingual English/Japanese Debian+KDE Howto

Everyone seems to have a hard time getting Japanese input to work, so I thought I'd write how I do it and then maybe people will google this page and the average post count for the Debian-Japanese list will less than 1. ^^ This HOWTO is for Testing/Unstable distributions as Skim isn't in stable.

To make your box multi-lingual it basically needs to be running with a UTF locale,you should google around if you need an explanation of UTF, strictly speaking with one UTF locale for example en_GB-UTF8 you should be able to use any other language but applications like input servers generally filter the languages they'll let you use based on the ones you have available.

Ok, the first thing to do is to either install the locales package or reconfigure it, either way you need to get something that looks like the dialog below.

$su
$apt-get install locales

$su
$dpkg-reconfigure locales

From here you need to select your native locales.. In my case the en_GB ones and the Japanese ones, select all of them out of each category just to be safe. Once you've selected ok you will be asked which should be used as your system default, select your native UTF locale. You should reboot here to make sure everything kicks in.

Simply put you need skim,scim and anthy to have Japanese input. Anthy does the actual Japanese part of the work while skim and scim act as bridges between anthy and X/KDE. Installing the skim and scim-anthy packages should pull in everything you need.

$apt-get install skim scim-anthy

If you're using a locale that isn't en_US you need to tell scim about it otherwise it won't let you use anthy. Edit /etc/scim/global and change the top line to something similar to the line below, using your locale of course.

/SupportedUnicodeLocales = en_GB.UTF-8

There is a input method framework that is meant to bring up input servers for users automagically.. I don't think it works all that well however. Chances are you are the only one that is going to be using Japanese on your box, so the best solution is to do everything in the ~/.xsession file. Edit you .xsession file and add the lines below, if you already have something in there make sure you take out anything that plays with locales variables like $LANG or $LC_CTYPE

export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM" ; export XMODIFIERS
startkde

You should now be able to press Ctrl-Space and be presented with a little tool bar, and you should be able to hit the button that says “English/European” and get a list of languages (there might be loads at this stage), traverse down the list and find Japanese, then select Anthy. If this doesn't work try running skim from a konsole, you should only have to do this once.

Now you should be able to type in ローマ字, hitting space will give you the 漢字 candidates for what you have written.