SCIM

Revision 2 as of 2006-01-09 11:24:57

Clear message

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.

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 [http://www.scim-im.org/wiki/faq/gtk_gnome/why_firefox_mozilla_acrobat_reader_7_other_gtk_2_based_apps_can_not_be_installed_started at here].

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 fail to start and crash:

  • RealPlayer 10

  • Adobe Reader 7
  • REALbasic 2005 for Linux

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

  • Mozilla Firefox binary tarball from Mozilla.org

Workaround

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.

== Official page == * http://www.scim-im.org/