Ubuntu Wiki

SCIM is a GTK-based input method engine for inputting non-English / non-ASCII characters in a GNOME/GTK environment. There is a KDE frontend called skim.

NOTE: This page is NOT a user's guide for SCIM. For user's guide, please refer to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM, and InputMethods/SCIM/Setup.

Program crash when SCIM is running

The SCIM package has a gcc C++ ABI incompatibility problem when using with programs that are compiled with a different gcc version. This problem has been confirmed in the official SCIM Wiki at here. More discussions can be found in LaunchPad.net and Debian bug tracking system.

The problem became obvious when Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 was released. Since Breezy has migrated to gcc 4.x for compiling all packages in the distro, including SCIM of course.

Hence when SCIM is running, the following proprietary programs which are compiled with a different gcc version (most likely gcc 3.2) will crash at start:

• RealPlayer 10

• Adobe Reader 7

• REALbasic 2006 for Linux

This has also plagued OSS packages that are compiled with an incompatible gcc version:

• Mozilla Firefox binary tarball from Mozilla.org

• Thunderbird

• OpenOffice.org 2.x binary packages from the official OpenOffice.org homepage (RPM convert to DEB by alien).

  • Note: In the case of OpenOffice.org, it won't crash like other programs mentioned. But SCIM will be disabled when using this official Linux version.

Workaround

Workaround in general

You can work around this problem temporarily, by exporting the following environment in command line:

export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim

Then start those applications manually.

Workaround for Firefox

For Firefox you can use the instruction above to bypass the problem, but SCIM will be disabled and it wouldn't serve the purpose. You can try to compile your own Firefox build, see CompileFirefoxNewVersion for further detail. Or you can try other third-party gcc4 compiled build such as Swiftfox.

Workaround for OpenOffice.org 2.x Linux binary from the official site

After installation is complete, first, you need to rename the standard C++ library (libstdc++) bundled to something else:

cd /opt/openoffice.org2.0/program
sudo mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6-bak

Then, create a symlink to the C++ library in the current Ubuntu system.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6

There you go, SCIM will be enabled again when you launch the official version of OpenOffice.org 2.x.

Other packages that use SCIM

• Keyboard Mapping for Linux - http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/

a source-compatible Keyman-like smart context-aware keyboard mapper. Upstream Debian Keyboard catalog

Official page

• SCIM - http://www.scim-im.org/

• skim - http://scim.sourceforge.net/skim/doc/user/