#2 Utter chaos with SCIM and KMFL on Feisty

[balshan]

This is my first go with SCIM and KMFL as I've just switched back to Linux after a 3-year hiatus! I've sunk more than 8 hours now into configuring this and it caused a system crash, so I'm at my wits' end.

I followed the (albeit old) installation instructions from the site and set up SCIM. I used the Feisty repositories to find it, and wound up with v1.4.4 of all the important files (but 0.9.4 of scim-qtimm).
I then created ~/.bash_profile as directed. Later on I found I needed quotes to set GTK_IM_MODULE and XMODIFIERS and added them. Feisty already uses the correct locale.

Here's where problem 1 occurs: Nothing can get SCIM to start on login. I created the startscim file and tried putting it in /bin, /usr/bin, and ~/bin (the last one was the one recommended). None of them work. No SCIM-related processes are running when I log in.

Then, the next problem. I can run scim -d in bash to kick SCIM to life, but there's no icon in the system tray for me to use to configure KMFL. I've explored man scim and the available options under scim -l plenty and haven't found any way to configure SCIM to use the KMFL imengine.

And here's the last, most awful problem. Through some weird configuration tricks I managed to get scim_kmfl_imengine installed. But it wouldn't work, because it was a Dapper package, and it was 0.9.5 while the rest of the files as noted above were 0.9.4, so there was some sort of compatibility issue. (Of course I wouldn't have known if it HAD worked because it wouldn't show up in the scim -l options or in the system tray.) So I went through all my SCIM and KMFL files and reinstalled them, but scim_kmfl_imengine would not reinstall because it is not in any Ubuntu repository. So I went to sourceforge and found the 0.9.4 version of scim_kmfl_imengine. And tried to install it using the directions in the package. It would respond to ./configure but not to make or make check or make install. And this is where my machine started freaking out and going crazy. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but basically System Monitor, GNOME and Nautilus all crashed, leaving me with a blank X window and X cursor and no OS.

Oh yeah and one more thing: even when SCIM is up and running, it only interfaces with GEdit, not with OpenOffice.

I'm a field linguist, and make a lot of use of IPA characters in particular, and it's worth my while to put time and effort into making this work, but I've put in a bunch already, and I'm just messing things up, I'm sure!

PS: When is 1.0 coming out? Thought that should have been last year!

PPS: I know that active support isn't really up and running since it's still in testing, but there's really no other *NIX option for me as a linguist than KMFL, so if nobody on here can help, maybe you could point me somewhere that could?

[balshan]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1805628
Originator: YES

PPPS: I welcome email responses, since I don't know if I'll be notified when something is added to the thread: linguista@gmail.com