A problem with iBus in Mageia 2 and Mandriva 2011

I just found an interesting problem in the way Mageia 2 handles typing Asian languages with iBus, the Input Method Editor (IME) that is configured easily during the installation of the distro.

For work reasons, I need my computers to be able to handle Japanese (and for fun, Korean and Thai).  You can do this with iBus (a more modern IME) or SCIM.  I chose iBus because you can install it during the installation process of Mageia. 

I had not seen this situation before because I have installed iBus only to computers that have an English keyboard.  However, since my main desktop computer has a Spanish keyboard, when I opened LibreOffice, I discovered that iBus was preventing the keyboard to display the accents ("tildes") of Spanish and those of French.

After using the SU command and inputting my root password, I wrote this in the terminal:
cd /etc/sysconfig

export $(dbus-launch)

kwrite

Then, when the graphical interface of kwrite came up, I opened the file i18n and found these entries related to iBus:


GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
XIM_PROGRAM="ibus-daemon -d -x"
XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus

I played with them a bit and the only thing I achieved was to break the IME, which slowed down the session start in Mageia.  Therefore, I tried to install automatically good old SCIM from the locale administrator in the Mageia Control Center.  It told me that there was no scim-tables packages, but I restarted the session anyway to find that SCIM was, effectively, not working

No problem.  I went to the file i18n in /etc/sysconfig again and saw that the following lines had been changed to make SCIM work instead of iBus:


GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
QT_IM_MODULE=xim
XIM_PROGRAM="scim -d"
XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM

The problem was the second line.  It has to read
QT_IM_MODULE=scim

so I changed it.

The next step was to remove the libreoffice-kde4 integration package.  After doing that, SCIM started to work and I could type the correct Spanish accents.

Mandriva 2011 shows the same problem with iBus if you have a Spanish keyboard.  However, although the locale manager installs SCIM with the missing scim-tables package, it took me more time to get SCIM to work.  It so happened that Mandriva did not install several important dependencies (scim-bridge-gkt, scim-bridge-qt4) and libreoffice-gnome, which were needed for the IME to work (provided you remove the package libreoffice-kde4).