Wisdom is the prime thing

I was having difficulty with the “Smart Pinyin” input method for scim: it kept locking up my computer.

When starting X, I would just see the X cursor, and would never get to my desktop. If I commented out the scim-related lines from my .xinitrc, and ran those lines in a terminal, I would see my memory usage rise and my processor usage become pegged near 100%. When I uninstalled the ArchLinux scim-pinyin package, scim would load just fine and my computer was usable again. I did lots of searching but was unable to come across any help for this scenario.

The lines in my ~/.xinitrc that load the scim input method are the following:

# SCIM support
export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM
export GTK_IM_MODULE="scim"
export QT_IM_MODULE="scim"
scim -d

Here are the steps I took that resolved the problem for me:

1. Enable the locales you want to type in inside /etc/locale.gen and then run locale-gen
2. Delete your ~/.scim folder
3. Exit X, and log back in again

You’ll have to set up all your scim settings again, of course. But in just a few minutes you’ll be typing away in Chinese — or any other language, for that matter…