Setting up Chinese language support in Ubuntu

The freely distributed Ubuntu operating system includes easily installed Chinese fonts and input methods (Pinyin, Zhuyin, and others), as well as the OpenOffice office suite with support for East Asian languages. Ubuntu’s growing popularity, together with the release of a netbook edition, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, convinced me to publish this brief user guide to setting up Chinese support in the 2009 Ubuntu releases and OpenOffice, and to installing input methods and fonts.

In presenting this guide, I assume that you use Ubuntu with Russian as the main language of menus and system notifications. I will not discuss the initial Ubuntu installation procedure in detail, assuming only that you will not install Ubuntu in Chinese simply to work with Chinese texts.

Make sure your computer is connected to the internet when updating Ubuntu, since setting up Chinese support requires downloading many files. If you use the standard desktop, follow the path System -> Administration -> Language Support (see the screenshot below).

In the October 2009 Ubuntu release, the window for configuring menu languages and input methods looks as follows:

In the "Keyboard input method system" menu, select "ibus". These steps produce a keyboard-and-globe icon in the notification area: this is the IBus input service icon. Its developers call it a "framework", a term debatable from the perspective of Russian usage and English-to-Russian translation practice:

Right-clicking the IBus input service icon and choosing "Preferences" opens a window whose middle tab lets you select the input methods you need. I chose a Pinyin-based input service, which I use to enter simplified characters, and a service for entering traditional and simplified characters based on the Chinese Pinyin phonetic alphabet.

Next, close the window and restart IBus by right-clicking its notification area icon and selecting "Restart". Pressing "Ctrl" and "Space" now starts IBus, as indicated by its window, which looks like this:

To switch to the next input method, press "Alt" and "Shift". The character selection window looks like this:

This article is discussed on the Chinese–Russian Center website’s forum here.