In order to implement and test international input on Linux, I had to get an input method such as SCIM working.
It turned out my locales were not installed, so I decided to upgrade my GNU libc while I was at it, and that didn’t go too smoothly. I’m running on Ecere Linux which has been my self-built Linux distribution for many years. Here’s a few hints to those trying to build their libc (I upgraded to 2.7).
If you get something like /bin/sh: no: command not found, it seems this is just a tactics from the configure script to fail, and “no” here is a placeholder for some tools not recent enough. Upgrading gettext was the solution to that one.
Make sure march is set or you might get something like undefined reference to `__sync_bool_compare_and_swap_4′.
For some other unknown reason, I had undefined reference to `__stack_chk_guard’ while trying to build the nscd directory. I had to manually edit the Makefile and add -lssp to that line LDLIBS-nscd = $(selinux-LIBS) -lssp .
My working configure line was the following:
export CHOST=”i686-pc-linux-gnu”; export CFLAGS=”-O2 -march=i686″; ../glibc-2.7/configure –enable-shared –prefix=/usr –enable-profile=no –enable-add-ons –enable-kernel=2.6.0
I was quite relieved to see “Your new glibc installation seems to be ok.” come up on the screen.
After make install, I couldn’t couldn’t login remotely or from the console, su would jam on a send.
Upgrading the coreutils and/or restarting my syslogd seemed to resolve that.
Then to install the locales I did: make localedata/install-locales
With locales in place, SCIM was more likely to work. I installed scim, anthy & scim-anthy for japanese support, kasumi which is a dictionary editing tool which you can use with anthy, as well as scim-pinyin for writing chinese in pinyin.
In order to make SCIM work with XIM, the following environment variable should be set: XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
SCIM should also be initialized on X startup with: scim -d
I tested with Firefox, but Firefox 2 would crash if my locale was set to Japanese. I tried Firefox 3 beta 1 and I could finally type my first japanese characters in Linux!