[tlug] ibus in Fedora

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

Well, Fedora is trying to implement a new input manager, iBus.  (Ooops,
I guess I've seen too much Apple stuff lately, that's Ibus.) 

Here are the theoretical advantages over scim:

(Quote from Fedora-testing list). 

 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 time and memory footprint.
* 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 Provider

(End of quote)

So far, I've found that while it works well with OpenOffice and Firefox,
unlike scim, it doesn't work with opera, urxvt or uxterm.   (I'm running
openbox or fluxbox rather than Gnome, which might be a problem, since
Fedora is as closely tied to Gnome these days as Windows is to its
graphics environment--for example, sound is tied to consolekit.)

In addition, on Rawhide at least (Fedora 11) it seems to break using
Scim with OpenOffice. Even on Fedora 10, if one has ibus installed, scim
won't work with openoffice, which instead just complains about being
unable to connect with the ibus daemon.

Hopefully, it will improve with time. I'm debating filing a bug, but
knowing Fedora, it will probably just be ignored, as they seem to figure
that all their users will just use default apps. 

Anyway, if anyone is interesting, they are having a testing day on
Thursday. 

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2009-05-14_iBus


I suspect that most tluggers aren't the typical Fedora user though.  

-- 
Scott Robbins
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