[tlug] SOLVED: Re: Vietnamese Dvorak?

[Jonathan Byrne <jonathan@example.com>]

With some help from the guys in the VietLUG forum on Facebook, chiefly 
Ngô Trung - maintainer of ibus-bogo - this is solved.

Yeah, Google says to try scim-unikey, but nothing tells you anything 
about how to get it into Dvorak or what to do when it doesn't work :-) 
Trung gave me a patched version of /usr/share/ibus/component/unikey.xml 
that makes it work with a Dvorak layout. I also found that for some 
reason, some packages (including scim-anthy) had gotten uninstalled (not 
by direct action of myself, I suspect some dependency-related thing) and 
that Japanese input was also broken (hadn't used it in a couple months, 
so who knows for how long).

After re-installing the needed packages, it would work but only in the 
Ubuntu search lens. All apps were a no-go for both Vietnamese and 
Japanese input. Finally, after a number of restarts of scim, it just 
started working. I hate those "phantom fixes" where I really don't know 
what the final thing was (had changed nothing before that last scim 
restart; it was just desperation <g>), since it did work, I'll take it :-)

One thing that I was never able to make work was just adding 
"Vietnamese" from the list of available text input methods in Ubuntu. If 
you find yourself in need of VNese input, I'd suggest not even bothering 
with that and going straight to scim-unikey. I hear that bogo-unikey is 
better, but the docs are not yet translated to English and it's possibly 
not yet fully ready for prime time - available only in source form from 
github. I've come to like the stability and reliability of using only 
Ubuntu packages and rarely use even PPA packages. When I do, I only draw 
them from stable, active PPAs, so I'm not going to be compiling the 
ibus-bogo code anytime soon but will hope it gets included in Ubuntu or 
comes to a solid PPA.

Lazily yours :)

Jonathan



On 02/18/2014 09:51 AM, Kalin KOZHUHAROV wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 6:38 PM, Jonathan Byrne <jonathan@example.com> wrote:
> > Anybody know how to do Vietnamese input with Dvorak keyboard layout in
> > Ubuntu (13.10)?
> >
> > Not a problem with Japanese, but clueless WRT doing the same with
> > Vietnamese.
> Should be the same as QWERTY for vietnamese (proper IME), keyboard
> layout is more of a hardware thing with X and how your keys are
> ordered or whether you have physical keys is not a question the IME
> should ask. Even if you cannot figure out how to setup the "modifier"
> key to turn on/off the IME, it has usually some mouse-clickable GUI.
>
> > Google's no help, I suspect the instructions - if they exist
> > - are all in, well, Vietnamese :-) Since I'm nowhere near proficient
> > enough to ask how to do that in the target language, the answer thus
> > eludes me :p
> Google said try this: http://code.google.com/p/scim-unikey/
>
> Kalin.