Chinese Language Support in Fedora Core 5
At the advice of a friend of mind from TrendMicro, it would be best to learn Chinese mandarin by learning the Chinese characters at the same time. Since, similar looking characters have similar meanings. So, I decided to try it by installing 拼音 (pin1yin1) input support for my Fedora Core 5 system. There are a number of things that need to be done first. However, overall it is easier than I originally thought.
- Install the Chinese Language Support pack. Thankfully, Fedora Core 3 and above come with these language support packs that install all the requisite packages such as fonts, input engines, language packages for particular applications like openoffice.org and firefox and others. The core of this system is the Smart Common Input Method (SCIM).
yum groupinstall Chinese-support
- Next step, the SCIM pinyin input conversion engine must be installed to allow inputting Chinese characters using pinyin on an English keyboard.
yum install scim-pinyin
- Since an Asian language locale is not my default locale, these additional entries must be made to enable SCIM.
mkdir ~/.xinput.d ln -s /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim ~/.xinput.d/default
After installation, you will see a greyed out keyboard in the notification area of your GNOME desktop panel. Clicking on this grey keyboard will enable a particular input engine. It should be under Simplified Chinese then select 普通话音 (pu3tong1hua4yin1)。After this, you should be all set. Just type the 拼音 (pin1yin1) and the appropriate characters will appear. If there is ambiguity a selection box will appear for you to type the number of the appropriate choice. 好运 (hao3yun4)!
