Puppy Linux Tahr 5.0.6 fits into 1G of disk space and runs well on only 500mb of RAM on an old XP box.
Previously I installed Puppy Linux Slako 5.7.1 with SCIM Chinese. Since I regularly use Ubuntu I thought it best to install Puppy Linux Tahr 5.0.6, commonly called “tahrpup” instead. I tried to install SCIM Chinese teh same way as on the Slacko version, and it failed. Eventually I did get the FCITX Chinese to install. It works very well, but was somewhat difficult to find out what works.
Installing SCIM Chinese to Tahrpup
Firstly I tried installing the SCIM Chinese .pet, specifically scim_1.4.14-en-zh-raring-13.0.2.pet I downloaded from the Puppy Linux forum. This went Ok. I then installed the scim-pinyin package from the ubuntu repository. While I could do a ctrl-space to get into Chinese input, input pinyin and select the proper Chinese characters, I could not get the SCIM setup screen to appear. Thus, many of the Chinese options that I do not want also appeared. As Pinyin Joe says, SCIM appears to be abandoned, I thought I could do better.
Some users still install the SCIM framework in Ubuntu and use the Smart Pinyin (智能拼音) IME instead. This one is very good and quite stable (and similar to Microsoft’s MSPY), but I believe development ended in 2005.
What happened next does not happen in Ubuntu. I uninstalled the SCIM packages. This caused some major repercussions. Firstly, after the uninstall the SCIM setup was still in the menu. Secondly, my FCITX install did not work. After some research I did a
#fcitx-diagnose
only to find that some internal variables were still pointing to SCIM when they should be fcitx. The fastest solution to this is to completely reinstall Puppy. This means rebooting from CD, loading Puppy into RAM, then doing a disk install, overwriting the last version. Time wasting it is, but it worked.
Installing FCITX Chinese on TahrPup
I first used the Puppy Package Manager to install scim-SunPin, which installed 3 packages. I then installed fcitx_4.2.7-en-zh-raring-13.0.2.pet from the Puppy Linux forum, pp 27. Search for “tahrpup”, as there are so many varieties of Puppy. I thank icake for maintenance of these files. Note that to read the labels on the download site pages you will need another PC with Chinese. The file names are in English, making downloading these files easier. Page 1, chaotic, yes, has links for the Half Chinese downloads (Chinese input and display only, not your whole operating system) from Google Drive or Baidu Cloud. You cannot use Opera on Google Drive, for some reason.
After you do this second install you need to restart xorg. To do this you do a cntrl-alt-backspace and type “startx”. The screen will then clear and reload the whole desktop.
startx
To test fcitx Chinese, open the Geany text editor, then ctrl-space. You should see the fcitx logo. Type in your pinyin and the Chinese options should appear. A Sun Pinyin toolbar should also appear. I dragged this toolbar down to the boottom screen toolbar. Hit ctrl-space and fcitx should disappear.
If you do have some issues with FCITX, do not try to uninstall the packages. I did and it messed up my xorg and I broke my desktop. Again, the best option is to reinstall Puppy from CD to disk.
Tahrpup Performance on a 13 year old machine
Somewhat temperamental in the install, Puppy Linux actually runs pretty well on my old Windows ME box, which has 500mb ram and a 12G disk. I installed it dual boot. Opera is not too bad, but open multiple windows and everything slows down. it is best to do things one window at a time.
