iBus Test Day on Thursday

[AdamW]

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Will Woods lovingly caressing his Thinkpad's fingerprint reader for the sixty seventh time today? No, it's - another Test Day!

Yes, this Thursday - May 14th - will be a Test Day for iBus, the new default input method framework for Asian languages for Fedora 11. As always, it'll be held in #fedora-qa on Freenode IRC (see this page if you're not sure how to use IRC). The exact time is quite flexible, we will have developers, QA folks and testers all the way through 'Thursday' for both Asian and American timezones, most likely.

If you type in an Asian language, this is a really big deal for you. If you don't, well...it's not. If you do, though, please do come out to the Test Day! This is one of those things that's crucial for some people and completely impenetrable to others, so we really need as many as possible of those who need it and understand it to come out to the Test Day and make sure it works.

Here's the good stuff: the testing is pretty easy, and there's a live CD, so you don't need to have any version of Fedora installed at all to do the testing. So even if you don't use Fedora, you can help out the development of iBus - and hence all distributions, as they all either use it already or will be in future - by coming out to the Test Day and helping to test this new framework. If you don't, and Fedora 11 (or the new version of your favourite distribution) comes out and you find you can't type Korean any more - you've no-one to blame but yourself! Well, you and whichever idiot left the bug in the code. But mostly you. So come on out!

For any of you reading this who may be involved in Asian language-speaking forums / communities - please please spread the word about this there. Thanks!

[scottro]

As I mentioned on testing list, I probably won't be able to participate.

However, for others who might, here's what I've found.

Running a system with openbox as the window manager, no Gnome, no KDE

Works well in OpenOffice and Firefox. Doesn't work in uxterm, Doesn't work in opera, (though I believe there's a thread on the forums about that, and someone else got it working.) Doesn't work in urxvt or uxterm. Furthermore, it seems that having it on the system affects how scim deals with openoffice, oddly enough. (If setting LC_CTYPE to ja_JP.UTF-8, and running openoffice, even if one has run im-chooser and chosen scim, it complains about failing to connect to ibus.)

I would guess it probably works in Gnome Terminal, so for those who like that sort of thing, it should be good. For myself, and others who try to keep a more minimalist (to us, less bloated, to others, less features, depends on one's point of view), right now, it's a bit of a regression, despite various advantages that it DEFINITELY has over scim.

However, for me, at this point, it doesn't work in the three places I'm most likely to use it. :-(

Unfortunately, it seems most of what I found while googling was in Chinese rather than Japanese, so I was at a loss.

Wayne, if you see this, take it for a spin, whether on test day or not--Peter (codergeek and some numbers), you too.

Hi Scott,

No, I won't be able to try it out. I've been a little busy with work the last few days..... I'll pop in to see what others are saying about it, if anyone else uses DBCS input that is

But if it's seriously broken, I may switch to Mint. I need Japanese to work and I'm not going to f*rt about

Edit: This is partly in response to your comment on the LUG

Wayne

[scottro]

Depends what you use. If it's mostly OpenOffice and such, it should be fine. If you use Gnome-terminal, I would guess it's fine, though that's untested.

I mostly use Japanese in Bluefish and Evolution. I really don't have time to test it though...

I'm kind of missing GJiten on Fedora too

Wayne

[scottro]

My guess is that it will work, probably better than scim, with those two--it seems to be a GTK2 app. I realize you don't have time to test, but hopefully, some of the testers will give it a shot.

[scottro]

Ok Wayne, just for you, I threw both apps on a VM. It works perfectly with them.

I think the worries are more for folks like me, who use Japanese in non-gtk apps.

[scottro]

Ok, Wayne, I think this merits a W007 or is it w007 or whatever the young 'uns do that has a lot of circle letters in it.

I uninstalled all ibus stuff. I ran an update, which updated, among other things (but a relatively small update) glibc--I don't know if that was a factor or not.

I then did yum install @japanese-support.

It didn't install too much, as I have most of the things--just brought me the latest ibus-anthy and company, and perhaps an extra font or two.

Now, it works with everything, including opera, urxvt and uxterm.

Thanks for testing Is that on F11 Preview? I haven't got it installed so can't try it, but I have noticed ibus is in F10 updates-testing.....

Wayne

[BrillianceLin]

Originally Posted by Wayne

Thanks for testing Is that on F11 Preview? I haven't got it installed so can't try it, but I have noticed ibus is in F10 updates-testing.....

Wayne

Yup, it is in the preview. As long as it's the "iBus". I had used it since last Saturday. Is it kind of jump start or different thing?

[scottro]

Yes, it is. I can try it on F10 tomorrow if I have time.

I would definitely take it for a test drive. VERY subjective personal impression, it's nicer than scim. Even the fonts looked better, but that might have been the rosy glow after I got everything working. Just use im-chooser to pick it. You might then have to start it with

ibus-daemon

(You might get an error it can't connect to something or another, but that can probably be ignored.)

Lastly, be sure you add anthy to it--it was a tiny bit tricky--no methods are visible, but there's a drop down box where you can get to Japanese then anthy but then you have to click add.

You should see what I mean when you try it. I did get it working in OO in F10, so I suspect the other stuff will be fine. I'm also going to try some updating my F10 tomorrow and see if that helps, as it did in F11 (though in F10, even more than F11, I really only use for urxvt, as I only use it on the rare occasions when I have to ssh to my home machine and possibly answer an email in mutt.. That's because I'm pretty diligent at work, as I'm usually far behind--I think you know that feeling--and only ssh to home when I need to test something from outside).

OO always took a little more effort with scim--that is, with everything else, I was fine with LC_CTYPE being en_US.UTF-8 whereas with OO I had to do ja_JP.UTF-8, but I don't have that need with ibus.

There's a few other nice things about it too, but those are more backend advantages, I think.

Unfortunately, not available in CentOS, and probably not even doable, as CentOS uses python 2.4 and it requires 2.5.

I'd like to try it but scim-anthy has always worked for me and I don't want to mess around with something that might break

OK. So, today I'm mostly free but I'd rather spend my only day off doing something other than sitting here testing stuff, I'd also like to go somewhere else to have a beer

Wayne

Being a glutton for punishment, I removed scim-anthy, etc, and installed ibus-anthy. It works but I really don't see the benefit of it over scim.

Wayne

[scottro]

Much of it is backend.

As I said, to me, even the fonts seemed a bit nicer, but anyway, pretty much what I said on tlug. I will quote it here for others who come across the post.

Ibus has been rewritten in C. Scim written in C++ using STL has
problems with weak symbol conflicts without the added complexity and
lower stability of the scim-bridge layer to workaround that.
* It is possible to write client and engines for ibus in any language
that supports dbus bindings.
* ibus loads engines on demand rather than all installed engines as scim
does, which improves the startup tim scim loads engines as dl-modules so a problem in any engine can take
down scim, whereas in ibus because the processes are separated only a
faulty process will die leaving rest of the system working normally.
* The architecture of ibus is bus-centric and so much closer to the CJK
OSS Forum Workgroup 3 draft "Specification of IM engine Service Provide and memory footprint.

Note the bit about process separation--although this has never affected me with my relatively light use, apparently, rather than having to completely kill it and start again, you will be able to only kill the bad process. Someone mentioned that on the testing list, as something that they'd already found to be an advantage.

@BrillianceLin, I'm not quite sure what you meant by your question--if you mean is what is in F10 is the same program as the one we're talking about, yes.

Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never had to kill SCIM.... As I said, it's always worked I had a problem with it once, but that was quite a while ago and on an Ubuntu box....

I've just updated ibus-anthy from updates-testing. I'll run with it for a while but like a lot of things on my system (Mono, Packagekit) it might not last long

Wayne