I have had enough. I had XP installed when I bought my computer, and both Japanese and Chinese IME worked out of the box. I wanted to give Suse a chance, though, so I bought and installed it. Of course, the packages I would need for CJK support was not included on any of the half a dozen discs shipped with the quite expensive 9.1 pro (surprise!). I was told

Since I don't know who is responsible, I don't blame anyone in particular. I just know that I bought version 9.1 (with the added designation "professional" of an OS supposedly developed by the company "With the largest dedicated Linux research and development team, [delivering] enterprise-ready software and services that harness the innovation, speed-to-market and independence" (if I hadn't suffered so much from their enterprise-ready software, this would make me laugh out loud) and I was hoping to be able to type in a language understood by every fourth person on earth. After endless nights of searching and downloading, I still can't. Not only doesn't Chinese or Japanese work out of the box, it's also next-to-impossible to get it to work. It seems obvious that a certain amount of incompetence has to be involved. Why on earth couldn't it be integrated into the OS? Installing the files you mention seems easy enough, but launching it and getting it to work in emacs is probably more like Chinese torture. I have tried to get canna to work before, and then all the files were present from the start, but that didn't prevent the installation from taking more than a week. Is there a description anywhere listing the steps that need to be taken? Typically, Linux instructions say something like "install the fonts in the proper directoy and tell TeX where to find them. Then compile the whole package. Most of the libraries are included in the gzip file." That is grand if you already knew how to do it, in which case the instructions are unnecessarry, otherwise it's plain idiotic. Gustaf ------- Ursprungligt brev ------- Från: jsc@rock-tnsc.com Datum: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:49:33 +0800 Gustaf, I can well understand your frustration. Sometimes it doesn't matter what you do the damn thing just doesn't seem to work. Not having easy access to an internet connection makes your problems at least twice as hard to overcome. I have scim and Chinese input working, fortunately for me it was an easy process to install. In the past (12 months or so ago) I had many problems with it including some of the dependency issues you mentioned. It is not unreasonable to expect SuSE 9.1 to have a working CJK IM setup. However it has to be pointed out that at the time SuSE 9.1 came out, only about 6 months ago, scim was still very immature. IM in general under Linux was very ad hoc. I wasn't happy at all with scim's performance. Over the course of the last 6 months scim has improved a lot and for the first time in years I don't feel that using Chinese in Linux is second rate to Windows. IM has been a part of Linux and OSS in general that has been very underdeveloped the last few years, however if you are new to Linux you are lucky because we are on the dawn of m17n maturing into a real great useable system. Just do a search for IIIMF on the web and see what is near the end of the pipeline. To get scim working I installed the following downloaded from Mike's directory: Component Version scim 1.0.0-0.1 scim-chinese 0.4.1-0.1 scim-tables-zh 0.4.3-0.1 skim 0.9.7-1.1 (Skim is a KDE version of the gtk scim frontend). I installed all the above through yast on a patched 9.1 system (all patches installed through yast online update). I have not independently upgraded any gnome or gtk packages. I do have the latest KDE installed. I would suggest removing all the scim files you have from the system and starting again with your SuSE discs in hand using Yast and installing the above files. As I said at the beginning I feel your paign, but I want to point out that Mike Fabian is responsible for all the CJK support (and other language support as well) at SuSE and that this is a mammoth task which he works very hard at. I'm sure you didn't intentionally call Mike incompetent and were letting off some steam...you get my point. Best of luck. Jethro Cramp On Wednesday 13 October 2004 17:16, Gustaf Kugelberg Jönsson wrote: that

I needed to find and install SCIM, which I tried. I downloaded

scim scim-chinese scim-tables-additional scim-tables-ja scim-tables-zh scim-uim scim-m17n

but ofcourse, this wasn't enough. While trying to install scim, I was told that

m17n-lib

was needed, so I searched for that on google and downloaded it too. This couldnt be installed without

libotf m17n-lib

so I had to find and download these too. At some point, I was also forced to find and install

wordcut

Finally, when trying to install all this in the correct order, I was told that some of these files demanded an earlier version of scim than I had installed, but since they where all downloaded from Mike's page, it should be OK, and in any case, there was nothing I could do. After this, yast asked me to install about a dozen of other applications like gnome and whatnot, but by then I had seen through the fraud. I might add that I dont have internet at home so each download required a trip to university with a bunch of floppys. Also, installing files from floppy in the new yast is quite a nuisance, it used to be quite reasonable once upon a time.

I have spent around 20 hours trying to get this crap to work, and it still doesn't, and then I haven't even started trying to get it to work in conjunctionwith an editor. I suppose it is all just a fraud, you are promised lots of funcionality, but in the end, you will never get it to work, so it's quite possible that it wasn't there in the first place. Seeing this is so, I won't ask you to help me install this, I will just switch to Windows and hope they won't hire any Suse staff to do their programming.

Does anyone not think that this is ridiculous? How can anyone be so incredibly incompetent?

Has anyone actually got scim to work?

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