I cannot work in Kubuntu

[jyp]

I need to work in English, French (Canada) and Chinese. All of these locales are installed as well as skim (I reinstalled 2 times the scim_skim stuff).

Now the funny things.
I start kate (or konsole, whatever); the skim icon appears in the system tray; I start typing and as soon as I hit the "k" key, skim toggles in and I find myself in the chinese input method but without the ability to type a "k". I toggle out skim, I hit the "k" key and skim toggles in again. So in order to recover the ability to type a "k", I have to close the skim application.

But wait, it is not all.
I start kate again (and skim fires up too) and this time, I try to type in french; as long as skim is running, I can use the french variation of my keyboard, if, of course, I do not need the letter "k" which is by chance not used that much in french since we have other four letters words! If I close skim, I lose the ability to write french with the proper accents.

So, there is a bad keybinding somewhere, somehow, but in spite of perusing a lot of configuration files, I did not find anything.

Any idea to solve that problem? The weird thing is that, on my old dell laptop, everything is fine.

I posted before on skim problems without getting any answer. Maybe my desktop machine is weird.

Thanks
jy

[kbuser]

Re: I cannot work in Kubuntu

I have an azerty keyboard (I live in France) which I changed to a qwerty one (replacing some keys or overwriting some letters on other keys) Then I went to Settings/Regional & Accessibility/Keyboard layout/Layout and set the keyboard to canadian with variant multi. Then I added the spanish keyboard.

So I can write in three languages. The french letters with the accents are now in different places of course, but I have all of them; no one is missing.
In the Regional & Accessibility options you can check that you want to see the flag of the country in the systray. So clicking on the flag you can change language.  You can even set a keyboard shortcut for changing  language.(Regional and Accessibility options/keyboard shortcuts)

The reason why I chose a canadian keyboard setting on permanent basis is that it saves time. You dont have to go from french to english and vice versa and because it's more convenient for making passwords. You need letters and numbers and with an azerty keyboard you should press on Maj every time in order to obtain a number....

As for the chinese language, did you see it  in the list of languages in the Regional and Accessibility section? I didnt see it in mine....

[jyp]

Re: I cannot work in Kubuntu

I see the 3 languages I use (english, french and chinese); you can use the "add language button" in Country/Region & Language".

I also can switch from english to french using the keyboard shortcut (ctrl+alt+k) as long as skim is not running. If skim is running, then as soon as I hit the "k" key, the input method toggles in and I lose the "k" key. btw I couldn't have wiritten that message with skim running (cannot type "k").

It seems that the "k" key is binded to skim in a way or another.

I don't know how to get rid of that major inconvenience.

[kbuser]

Re: I cannot work in Kubuntu

Is skim useful in order to write in chinese? Can't you disable it? I don't have it in my systray. As I saw in Adept manager it is installed, though.

[jyp]

Re: I cannot work in Kubuntu

skim is the front end (kde) for scim; it is the tool to input asian languages (chisese, japanese, korean).

If skim is installed, the scim packages should be installed too. Check in Adept or with dpkg in konsole.
dpkg -l | grep -i *scim*

Go to K-menu > Utilities > Skim ; the Skim icon should appear in the system tray but in my case, it was not possible to use it at that stage.

I found a solution in the following link
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InputMethods/SCIM/Setup

Since your locale is not asian, you will fall in the category of user B or C (see at the bottom of the page).
Follow the instructions and when you start an application, skim will start automatically and you will be able to input chinese. I hope that you will not lose your "k" key!

[kbuser]

Re: I cannot work in Kubuntu

I found a solution in the following link
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/InputMethods/SCIM/Setup

thank you