So, I installed Karmic Koala and chose to make it a clean install (slowly learning from my Windows 7 experience...). I've got most of my stuff back to the way I like it, but I can't seem to remember how to get my Japanese fonts in Ubuntu looking good again. I've got them looking great in Firefox, but within the OS itself, like folder/document titles, the Japanese is pretty gross. I've been struggling with it all night. 誰か？助けてくれま〜すかっ？

Try

fontconfig-voodoo -f -s ja_JP

I haven't installed Karmic Koala yet (still a Linux n00b) but that worked well in Jaunty.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/219931

Thank you so much! That worked perfectly and I didn't even have to restart xserver. I'm writing it down for future reference. I just hadn't done a clean ubuntu install in so long... I'd forgotten how much you have to do to get everything all setup and looking beautiful.

Hey sethg,

I've just upgraded to karmic also and can't get the IME to work. I tried both IBus and scim and neither works. In scim I can't find any way to a Japanese input method, and in IBus I can add the inputmethod but IBus never seems to kick in when I use the hotkey. When I click on the IBus iconn it always says "No input window" which is of course not true.

What IME are you using?

This has totally shut down all my Japanese studies and work, I need to get this fixed ASAP if I want to pass my JLPT

Thanks!

Hey totsubo,

I'm honestly no linux expert, so I don't know if I can help much. Let me pre-apologize if I'm patronizing in my steps here.

I use SCIM and all I did was:

1. System > Administration > Language Support
2. Install Japanese.
3. Choose SCIM as keyboard IMS.
4. If you don't have SCIM, just get it through synaptic.

If you've already tried that, I'd go check out the ubuntu forums. There's a really good guide somewhere there about setting up Japanese support. I honestly don't remember exactly how I set it up as I was, too, just in a real hurry to be able to work in Japanese like usual again.

Good luck!

Yup, did all that.

The problem is that in the scim control panel (SCIM setup), under Global Setup I don't see Japanese as an input method service. Do you?

Thanks!

Yeah, I have "Japanese" and "Other". Hrmmm... might want to try a fresh install of SCIM? That's strange... How did you install SCIM in the first place?

Even a fesh install didn't help, but I did find the solution! I needed to install the scim-anthy package in order to have scim recognize a japanese input service. For some reason that it not installed by the Language Support tool even if you choose scim as the IME and Japanese as a language.

やった！

Jc