Using Chinese in Fedora Core 2

This article gives a simple way in which you can input Chinese characters in Fedora 2.

Step 1. Installation of Fedora Core 2

I install everything of Fedora Core 2 on my Notebook PC. This is the Pentium 3-based Gateway Solo Notebook PC with 512 MB of RAM and 30 GB of hard disk storage.

Step 2. Check that your browser can display the Chinese characters

Go to any website that has Chinese characters and check to make sure that your browser can display the Chinese characters properly. For example, I visited http://www.zaobao.com to view the daily news items in Chinese.

Step 3. Download the Smart Common Input Method (SCIM)

Go to the website at http://freedesktop.org/~suzhe/ and download the rpm for SCIM. The file name is “scim-0.99.2-1fc2.i386.rpm”. You only need this rpm in order to run SCIM. Download it to your home directory.

Step 4. Install the SCIM

Go to a terminal, then as root, type the following command:

rpm -Uvh scim*.rpm

Step 5. Starting the SCIM

Go to a terminal and type the command “scim”. This will start the scim daemon. You should see the following on the screen:

[kinchew@localhost kinchew]$ su
Password:
[root@localhost kinchew]# scim
Smart Common Input Method 0.99.2
Launching a SCIM daemon with Socket FrontEnd...
Loading simple Config module ...
Creating backend ...
Loading IMEngine module: pinyin ...
    Loading IMEngine Factory 0 ... : OK
pinyin IMEngine module is successfully
loaded.
Loading IMEngine module: rawcode ...
    Loading IMEngine Factory 0 ... : OK
rawcode IMEngine module is successfully
loaded.
Loading IMEngine module: table ...
Failed to load table IMEngine module.
Loading socket FrontEnd module ...
Starting SCIM as daemon ...
Launching a SCIM process with x11...
Loading socket Config module ...
Creating backend ...
Loading IMEngine module: socket ...
    Loading IMEngine Factory 0 ... : OK
    Loading IMEngine Factory 1 ... : OK
socket IMEngine module is successfully
loaded.
Loading x11 FrontEnd module ...
Starting SCIM ...
GTK Panel of SCIM 0.99.2

Starting as daemon ...

Step 6. Setting your terminal for Chinese input

Go to another terminal and execute the following command:

$ export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM

Step 7. Activating SCIM

Activate SCIM by pressing Ctrl-Space keys together. Once done, you will see the following at the right side of the bottom panel:

To start inputting Chinese characters, you can select the Smart Pinyin option by clicking the “RAW CODE” part of the panel and selecting "Chinese (simplified) – Smart Pinyin" option. Once done, you will see the following at the bottom panel:

Step 8. Input Chinese characters

You may now activate any X-Window program to input your Chinese characters. For example, I use the gedit editor and input the following Chinese characters in Smart Pinyin:

You can toggle between the Smart Pinyin and English by clicking the option at the bottom right panel.