[SOLVED] Japanese Input using IBus/Mozc

Question

Good day,
Recently, I finally managed to install Arch (phew!)
As the title suggests, I need to frequently use Japanese Input. I've tried Anthy, however, the prediction is bad and the dictionaries are lacking.
Then I've found mozc (successfully utilized on Mint and Manjaro before) along with IBus , which worked really great!
Running mozc successfully on Arch has been a series of unsuccessful attempts so far. I have browsed tons of pages about people having similar problems, none of the given solutions seem to work for me.
This is what I've done so far:
1. After installation of Arch, I installed Cinnamon and GDM.
2. I've followed IBus installation page. Installed ibus + ibus-qt packages, then installed mozc through yaourt.
3. Put the lines below to ~/.xprofile (Note: .xprofile didn't exist in the first place, so I created it).
export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
ibus-daemon -drx
and in ~/.bashrc
ibus-daemon -drx
5. Ran qtconfig-qt4, under the "Interface" tab, set ibus as default.
6. In /usr/bin/skype, I put the line below.
export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
7. Installed a set of Japanese fonts.
8. Finally, added the Japanese input -> mozc to my IBus input methods.
At this point, Japanese input is supposed to work after a relog. I decided to reboot, though, just for safety.
Yes, IBus did autostart. The tray icon would soon disappear for no reason. After restarting Cinnamon, it would magically re-appear and work with inputs like English/Polish properly. Japanese, too, albeit, not with the desired results.
First of all, the typed text in Japanese will not appear unless I press enter in applications like Firefox, Leafpad, LibreOffice. That is not the desired behavior of a Japanese Input Method Editor. Back on Mint/Manjaro the text would appear instantly, that's how it's supposed to behave.
I use Skype extensively, and the Japanese input doesn't seem to work there at all, even after putting the export line into /usr/bin/skype.
I was hoping somebody here would be able to help me. Thank you in advance!
Last edited by ConstruKction (2014-04-14 11:08:17)

Answer 1

Hello,
I went with the suggestion of using fcitx instead of IBus. I once again decided to follow the fcitx Arch Wiki thoroughly. Here's what I've done:
I've installed fcitx-im and fcitx-mozc packages. Before that, I completely removed IBus.
I put this in my ~/.xprofile and ~/.profile
export GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx
export QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx
export XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"
After that, I configured my fcitx, and added mozc as my layout for Japanese.
Ran this command, too since Gnome apparently tries its best to break other IMEs.
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.keyboard active false
Fcitx seemed much, much better than IBus. It's faster and more responsive, however, the Skype lament still persisted, so I decided to test out one more thing, which has caught my eye whenever I ran an application through the console. The error message was saying something about 'falling back to the "C" locale', so I went way back to the "locale" Arch Wiki article, only to find out, that inside my /etc/locale.gen, I had only one US locale. On top of that, the US locale in locale.gen was different than the US locale in /etc/locale.conf.
A silly, yet, overlooked mistake.
After uncommenting my locale, generating a new one and rebooting my system, Skype finally came back to life, and I was able to type Japanese inside its text field.
Thank you again for your input! This case is solved.