Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.

I managed to compile, configure and use SCIM in Crux, and with only minor annoyances, it’s working well too. I found (very) out-of-date Pkgfiles for scim, anthy and scim-anthy on the ports search page for Crux 2.4, and after some minor modifications, I’ve got them all running in a happy little triangle, sort of.

Configuring them was the hard part; for some reason (which I understand now) scim was starting when I added the variables and start line in my .xinitrc file, but it was dropping away and quitting without ever doing anything. Which meant that the entire business was kind of a flop, even if it did compile, install and configure for me.

In short, I had been following the Crux page on SCIM configuration, changing the important parts from Chinese to Japanese. Adding those lines to /etc/profile (or .profile) was only a little successful, and the best results, really, were when I put them into .xinitrc. So I modified them only slightly, to this:

export LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8
export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
scim --no-socket -f x11 -d &

And that seems to do the trick. (Note the ampersand at the end of the last line.) The SCIM toolbar pops up when I trigger it with the zenkaku/hankaku key, and behaves just about right … except for my font issues.

For some reason the font appearing in, for example, Leafpad or a form on Firefox, are strange and twisted code letters. I have a feeling there’s a font I don’t have installed that I need to put into place, or worse, perhaps there’s something that I need to have configured before I compile those programs (--enable-nls? I wonder).

I don’t know for sure, and I fear the latter, since the fonts work fine in rxvt-unicode and within SCIM itself. If an extra font was needed, I wonder if it would just show coding boxes everywhere, rather than selectively having correct hiragana-katakana-kanji equivalents in some places as it does now.

Anyway, I’m definitely learning a lot from Crux, although it’s usually the old fashioned way — with me making a mistake, and Crux hitting me upside the head for it. I like to think of it as tough love.

P.S.: Here are the ports I made, borrowing from the outdated ones that appear in the Crux repository search.

# Description: Japanese input converter.
# Maintainer: 
# URL: http://sourceforge.jp/projects/anthy/
# Depends on:

name=anthy
version=9100
release=1
source=(http://globalbase.dl.sourceforge.jp/$name/26131/$name-$version.tar.gz)

build() {
        cd $name-$version
        ./configure --disable-nls --prefix=/usr
        make
        make install DESTDIR=$PKG PREFIX=$PKG/usr
}

# Description: Smart Common Input Method platform for Gnome (GTK).
# Maintainer: 
# URL: http://www.scim-im.org/
# Depends on: gtk intltool

name=scim
version=1.4.7
release=1
source=(http://dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/$name/$name-$version.tar.gz)

build() {
        cd $name-$version
        ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-nls
        # enable-nls is necessary for scim!
        make
        make install DESTDIR=$PKG
        rm -rf $PKG/usr/share/locale
}

# Description: Anthy interface for Smart Common Input Method.
# Maintainer: 
# URL: http://sourceforge.jp/projects/scim-imengine/
# Depends on: scim anthy gtk

name=scim-anthy
version=1.2.4
release=1
source=(http://osdn.dl.sourceforge.jp/scim-imengine/25404/$name-$version.tar.gz)

build() {
        cd $name-$version
        ./configure --disable-nls --prefix=/usr
        make
        make install DESTDIR=$PKG PREFIX=$PKG/usr
}