This time instead of trying SCIM or Ibus I just went for FCITX. After the initial install of Debian 8 Jessie’s fcitx-sunpinyin package, I had to do only a couple of command line statements, and it configured properly. This gave me a crude but working simplified Chinese input and display. Though it looks out of place with the slickness of Enlightenment E17, I am fine with it.
Chinese input is fun, for the warped mind that I am. Yes, it is exceptionally difficult to learn Chinese, but after that little hurdle, and significant eye strain, it is fun. Chinese input methods on Ubuntu 14.04 is somewhat confusing, as it is very easy to install, both for SunPinyin and Pinyin yet there are bugs. I installed SunPinyin, and when I could not input certain characters, also installed Pinyin. Here are the ones I found, and their fixes.
This old Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop, handed down to me because it was really broken, was tired as tired could be. I brought it back to life by eschewing Windows and embracing Lubuntu 14.04 LTS. Now it hums and runs really well. Here are some of my observations.
This Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop has 500mb of Ram, 2 of 4 broken USB ports, and a missing down arrow key. Apparently my mischievous nephew had heard that one of his toys was able to insert into a computer, so he tried this, twice, on this laptop. Two USB ports had sorted out and remain damaged, and Windows XP had crashed hard and was irrecoverable. I tried to rebuild XP, and it was largely successful, but could not configure the wifi to work. XP was slow, and running a browser was painfully slow. In essence it was a dead laptop.
Ever since I started this blog I have been wanting the ability to write in Chinese. Every time I did WordPress would dutifully save the content but would then replace my characters with rectangles. Well, now I think I solved the problem: UTF8 encoding. As roundabout as life is, I solved my Chinese input problem while trying to track down the remnants of the Pharma Hack injection.
