From ArchWiki

This article is a stub. It may be confusing, not contain enough information, or be a placeholder for an article to come. People are invited to expand it to full article status and remove this box.

This page explains how to get the Japanese input to work using UIM.
Written from a system with Gnome, people using other environments may skip/adapt commands.

[edit] Installation

[edit] Anthy

First we need to install Anthy :

# pacman -S anthy

[edit] UIM

[edit] Using pacman

Pull down the necessary things with a :

# pacman -S uim

GTK users will have to generate the immodules file :

$ gtk-query-immodules-2.0 /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules/im-uim.so > ~/.immodules

[edit] Compiling from source

Here are the steps I followed to get it to work with Gnome using the sources from the official site :

1. Get uim from the UIM download page
2. Extract the files
3. In the extracted files' folder do :

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/uim
$ make
# make install

remove or change the prefix if you're not happy with it but then you'd need to adapt paths and commands written below

Link to uim libraries :

# echo "/opt/uim/lib" >> /etc/ld.so.conf
# /sbin/ldconfig

Generate the immodules file :

$ gtk-query-immodules-2.0 /opt/uim/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules/im-uim.so > ~/.immodules

You might consider updating your PATH so you can run uim related applications easily, for instance :

export UIM_HOME=/opt/uim
PATH=$UIM_HOME/bin:$PATH

[edit] Setting the environment variables

In your ~/.xprofile file add :

export GTK_IM_MODULE='uim'
export GTK_IM_MODULE_FILE=~/.immodules
export QT_IM_MODULE='uim'
uim-xim &
export XMODIFIERS=@im='uim'

[edit] UIM preferences

You can configure uim preferences by running :

$ uim-pref-gtk

which brings forth a GUI.

You can run uim-xim or logout/login to test your settings.
Provided everything went well you should be able to input Japanese in X.

お疲れ様です！

[edit] Useful literature

http://code.google.com/p/uim/wiki/OfficialUserDocument
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Uim