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(a)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:
> 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
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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