Linux Mint - SCIM

Here I'll just try to present an easy and simple method to help any user set up SCIM in Linux Mint, an Ubuntu variant I found a couple of weeks ago...

Most of this little guide is found in the official Ubuntu Documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM, but there are some small changes, as I don't need the full Chinese language pack (e.g. GIMP and OpenOffice's Chinese documentation...). So if you're using a western system and just want to input and display Chinese (for Japanese etc. just change the language code, ja instead of zh) this guide is for you. Let's start:

First of all you have to install the Chinese language support. Just type

sudo apt-get install language-support-input-zh language-support-fonts-zh

in the terminal and press Enter or install these packages via the Package Manager.

Since Linux Mint doesn't have the scim-bridge-client installed by default you have to install it, too. Type

sudo apt-get install scim-bridge-client-gtk

This will install the scim-bridge-client-gtk (for Gnome) and scim-bridge-agent.

Now we just have switch the Input Method on the X Windows System (Gnome)...
One last step, and you're ready to go:

Type

locale |grep LANG

This will display your locale. For example, Spanish (Spain) is "es_ES.UTF-8"

then type

im-switch -z (your locale) -s scim-bridge

for example

im-switch -z de_DE.UTF-8 -s scim-bridge

Voilà!

To use your shiny new input method right away simply restart X. ()