juhp's blog

X locale compose vs Unicode input

2010-08-24T16:51:00.007+10:00

A while ago in Fedora 11 some gtk2 immodules were subpackaged and no longer installed by default, including im-xim.so and im-cedilla.so. This led to a problem for Brazilian users who use us_intl keyboards and are used to typing "'" plus "c" to input "ç".

The simplest solution was to have them install im-cedilla.so, but of course that only works in GTK apps. Qt was already ok since it defaults to using XIM (X Input Method system) which supports "X Locale Compose" input consequences (X compose rules for a particular locale) like the one above for Brazilian users of us_intl keyboards. So I came up with the solution that we could use XIM also by default for GTK (just like Qt does) for all users that don't use an input-method system like ibus or scim). This is the default in F13 and was also backported to F12. Some European countries like Finland, Greece and Russia also seem to use X locale compose.

However this change introduced a regression for Unicode input in GTK apps. The default gtk-im-context-simple supports Unicode input by typing Ctrl+Shift+u plus a hexadecimal Unicode. But this does not work with the XIM immodule. Although this feature only works in GTK apps it is still useful to support for now. Of course users can also use ibus or even ibus-rawcode to input Unicode across all of GTK, Qt and X apps today. Anyway I have updated imsettings to only use XIM now for the few locales that really need X locale compose, all other non-input-method users will get gtk-im-context-simple by default again. Users can now turn on XIM in im-chooser to get X locale compose and more importantly are now able to turn it off easily.

As an extra wrinkle I discovered this week that XIM was breaking input for Norwegian users since nb_NO.utf8 and nn_NO.utf8 locale aliases are not supported yet by X.

I am wondering now if Fedora should also default Qt to its simple input method instead of XIM for consistency with GTK, and planning to ask the KDE SIG about that.

i18n Test Day!

2009-10-30T00:00:00.002+10:00

The Fedora QA Test Day for i18n is up and running.

Do join in the fun testing if Fedora 12 looks up to scratch for your language, and report your results and any bugs you may uncover! It's easy, just go to the wikipage, follow the testcases or make your own, and tell us what you find. :-)

Thank you for participating!

Haskell Platform

2009-10-07T00:45:00.003+10:00

The Fedora Haskell SIG is pleased that the Haskell Platform will ship in Fedora 12 and is now already available in Fedora 11 Updates. This allows Haskell developers just to run yum install haskell-platform and have a standard Haskell development environment with a set of tools and libraries to work on their projects. I could be wrong but Fedora may be for the first big distro to ship haskell-platform in its official repos. (Thanks to Bryan and Yaakov for their help in pushing this packaging effort through in time for F12 Beta.)

chromium-get-snap

2009-09-10T11:03:00.004+10:00

chromium-get-snap is an ugly hack (please throw flames into the brown paper bag in the back of the seat in front of you;) I have had for a while now to test Chromium dev builds on Fedora. I didn't create a yum repo for it (yet) but if there are requests I can. I recommend using spot's fedora builds for real use but sometimes it is nice to be able to test chromium.org's Tip of Tree continuous integration builds for 32bit Ubuntu... I might add a way of grabbing builds with revision close to the Chrome Dev channel branches one day, to avoid occasionally losing all my open tabs and other fun. ;) Obviously use at your own risk and the usual disclaimers...

Update (Sep 14)

I think Google Chrome dev channel rpms will be announced soon.

> a way of grabbing builds with revision close to the Chrome Dev channel branches

I am not sure how easy this will be to automate, but doing it by hand just involves jumping through a few hoops:

First check the Dev Channel announcements and note the latest branch number (eg at the time of writing it is 207 (as in version 4.0.207.0)).
Then go to the "207/src" dir in svn viewvc and you will see changelog messages like "Branching for 207 @25607" (alternatively and maybe quicker you may look at the detailed svn changelog link and note the branched trunk revision number there)
Finally run "chromium-get-snap ".

I haven't tried yet but if you are braver you might even try later branch merge builds (eg 207.x), or even the latest unreleased branch. Anyway whatever you do, you get to keep all the peaces. ;-)

Haskell cabal-install rocks

2009-06-13T17:00:00.009+10:00

Now that F11 is out I thought I would mention the Haskell cabal-install package which was added to Fedora during the F11 cycle (it is also in F10 updates).


$ sudo yum install cabal-install
$ cabal update  # download the list of available hackages
$ cabal install pandoc  # download, build, install package and deps
$ ~/.cabal/bin/pandoc -h

Pandoc is a text processing tool for converting from one markup format to another. The cabal-install cli frontend to the Haskell hackage repository makes it really easy for Haskell developers to pull down Haskell libraries and programs, build them and their dependencies automatically and install them in the user's ghc package.conf file.

You might also want to play with the xmonad window manager which the Fedora Haskell SIG also recently packaged in time for the F11 release.


$ sudo yum install xmonad
$ cabal install xmonad-contrib  # still not in fedora

xmonad-contrib is currently under package review and should land in Fedora before long.

Fedora QA Test Day for ibus

2009-05-14T19:37:00.002+10:00

Today is the day for the test event for the ibus feature in Fedora 11. Please join the fun and tell us how it works for you. Although ibus is primarily aimed at Asian users it would be fantastic to have more testing by non-Asian users too so that we can cut out any problems with normal xkb input, etc. Already our translators in Brisbane and Pune have spotted a few issues that we will be filing bugs for shortly.

ibus in F11

2009-05-02T08:58:00.002+10:00

I have been meaning to blog about iBus for a long time and now finally getting round tuit...

Thanks to the hard work of Peng Huang, the iBus project and people in the fedora-i18n team we have a nice new Input Method system feature in Fedora 11. I am pretty happy with how far we got for F11, the basic functionality is pretty much all there. I expect more polishing and improvements will land in F12 too, and other distros to follow our lead since scim development seems to be in maintainance mode now.

Z-Day

2009-03-15T23:05:00.004+10:00

Today, Sunday 15 March is Zeitgeist Day (or Z-Day for short). I feel the Zeitgeist Movement (and Venus Project) share a lot of ideals and ideas with Free Software Movement, or effectively extend the ideas socio-economically. If you have not had a chance to see the movies I encourage you to do that since they are pretty eye-opening.

I was helping my son convert the Japanese subtitles for Zeitgeist: Addendum from an .rtf encoded .stl file to Google Video's subtitle format. Standards are great when there are so many to choose from... My first experience with subtitles/closed-caption there. It seems to work well enough anyway. :)

Improving SCIM's UI

2008-06-27T00:24:00.000+10:00

Now that in Fedora Rawhide we're installing the scim input method and its main engines (IMEs) by default, I have been thinking about how to improve its language menu - since now there will be many entries for standard installs as there already have been for Live since Fedora 8.

Hopefully when this work is completed it should simplify the language menu and its usage considerably. For locale with associated scim factories (IME, input maps or tables), I plan just to list those by default. For locale without factories, maybe none, but in both cases there will be an entry to popup a factory chooser to allow addictional entries to be included (this basically copies the way the latest GDM does it). I am a bit less sure how to allow users to remove engines and languages from the menu - that still needs some thought.

new year new blog

2008-04-29T10:56:00.000+10:00

I moved my old blog (what little there was of it) to juhp2007 and started a fresh one here.

Well April is nearly over but it is probably New Year somewhere...!