IBus - now write in your mother tongue - मातृभाषेत लिहा

I love to write in my mother tongue Marathi. For last four years I was using a
wonderful package SCIM for it. But yesterday I upgraded to Kubuntu 10.10 and
found Skim crashing upon start. So decided to ditch it in favour of IBus since
SCIM is not actively developed. Here’s a small howto for getting IBus running
on Kubuntu.

How to configure IBus in Kubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat

First install IBus

$ sudo aptitude install ibus ibus-qt4 ibus-gtk ibus-m17n

Now switch input method (don’t use sudo here)

$ im-switch -s ibus

This will create a symlink in $HOME/.xinput.d/ directory.

If you already have symlink in $HOME/.xinput.d/ pointing to a file other than
ibus in /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/ directory then remove that symlink. Else the
above command will say File Exists and won’t create a new symlink.

Start IBus setup

Press Alt+F2 and type ibus-setup and press Enter

You will get a IBus Preferences window.

In General tab click Show icon on system tray

In Input Method tab select an input method of your choice and click Add button.

The first method in the list will be your default input method.

Adjust other options to suit to your own choice and close the window.

Starting IBus on KDE Startup

Go to
KMenu -> Applications -> Settings -> System Settings -> System Administration
-> Starup and Shutdown -> Add Program

Then put /usr/bin/ibus-daemon in Text Box and click OK. Now you will get a
Properties Dialog Box.

In that, click on Application tab and put
Name – ibus-daemon
Description – Intelligent Input Bus
Command – /usr/bin/ibus-daemon –desktop=kde –panel=/usr/lib/ibus/ibus-ui-kde
Click OK.

Now Logout of KDE and Login again.

Open text editor and press Control + Space and you should be able to write
in the language you chose as default input method.

EDIT: Additionally, you can export following variables in your ~/.bashrc

export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XMODIFIERS=”@im=ibus”

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