[CentOS] Installing support for Chinese text in Centos 7

On 05/27/2017 10:15 PM, H wrote:
> On 04/07/2017 10:12 AM, H wrote:
>> I installed fcitx-pinyn, and its dependencies, and I now have ZH as a choice but have not been able to type pinyin and get a list of Chinese characters to choose among like I could on CentOS 6. Does anyone have it working?
>>
>>
>> On 4/2/2017 11:27 AM, H wrote:
>>> Thank you, I just discovered your post. I just installed fcitx-pinyin to try out.
>>>
>>> On 02/25/2017 09:04 PM, Scott Robbins wrote:
>>>> On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 08:51:41PM -0500, Scott Robbins wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, Feb 25, 2017 at 08:42:43PM -0500, H wrote:
>>>>>> I have just done a minimal installation of Centos7 followed by X Windows and the Mate desktop on a workstation. Although the default language is English, I would like to be able to write Chinese text in various applications.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I seem to remember this was very easy to do in Centos 6 and Gnome: possibly only requiring only a simple 'yum groupinstall "Chinese Support"' after which I could use iBus to switch between languages. This does not seem to work in Centos 7.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> These days, I use fcitx-anthy on CentOS (which took some work to set up,
>>>>> but ibus-anthy, at least, (for Japanese) worked pretty well. I have
>>>>> instructions, again, for Japanese, but quite possibly applicable at
>>>>> http://srobb.net/jpninpt.html#CentOS6
>>>> I'm going to add that a quick look through pkgs.org shows that CentOS-7x
>>>> does have packages for fcitx-pinyin and a few other Chinese engines, and it
>>>> might be worth considering making the switch. It seems (general impression
>>>> on my part) to be replacing ibus in a lot of places, in the same way ibus
>>>> gradually replaced scim.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
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>
> Still have not solved my problem above, i.e., after installing fcitx I can switch between US English and a European language but not to Chinese.
>
> I run the Mate Desktop on CentOS 7 and the configuration tool for fcitx that has been installed in the Settings Panel complains that a fcitx-config/fcitx-configtool program is missing.
>
> I have not been able to find that program on the 'net and am hoping someone else - anyone - is using fcitx for input of an Asian language in CentOS7/Mate...
>
> By the way, LibreOffice seems to have a couple of Chinese fonts installed, I am not sure I need to install additional fonts for the OS?
>
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After leaving this along for several weeks I made another attempt at trying to get fcitx up and running on CentOS 7 and the Mate desktop. I discovered that there is a diagnostic tool, fcitx-diagnose, that provided some additional information.

One of the missing programs was the fcitx-configtool that lacked the GUI part and that so far I have been unable to find on the 'net. It seems that the appropriate GUI tool would be fcitx-config-gtk3 and is necessary for configuring fcitx.

Does anyone have fcitx-config-gtk3 up and running?

I have to vent and say that I am very, very surprised that this tool for entering Asian text on CentOS 7 is so poorly developed, poorly documented and poorly packaged. One would have thought that the Asian market for RHEL/CentOS 7 would be of sufficient importance for all relevant programs to be available in one of the key repositories.

I am under the impression that fcitx, considered the replacement of iBus used in CentOS 6 - and which worked flawlessly - has not been updated since 2013. Further, the developers have not bothered with a proper support website, instead most information is absent.