I always prefer to install the OS in English and enable the Chinese typing tool.  The Chinese fonts on applications tool bars just don’t make much sense to me. However, enabling the Chinese tool (scim) is not done by default if I install the OS these way, so I dropped down the notes here because these steps are easily forgotten and not straight forward.

  1. Go to System -> Administration -> Language Support
    Choose Chinese (Traditional and/or Simplified)
  2. install packages scim-chinese, and all other dependencies
  3. $ vi /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim
    change xim input to scim

    GTK_IM_MODULE=”scim”
    QT_IM_MODULE=”scim”

  4. without using root, type
    $ im-switch -z <Your locale> -s scim
    your locale can be figured out by command
    $ locale | grep LANG
  5. restart your X (Ctrl-Alt Del), then Ctrl-spacebar should give you a scim toolbar

P.S. After the scim toolbar is poping up, you still need to right click the toolbar to setup what input method you would like to use.  Personally, I used Changjie3 to type Chinese, it seems the closest to the Windows version of Changjie.

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