Japanese Input with Mozilla under Linux

One of the frustrations I had for many years was that I couldn't get proper Japanese input working with Netscape 4.x under Linux.

Finally, in May 2002 I heard that it worked OK with Mozilla 1.0, and that was enough to make me change over.

The steps to make this happen are actually very simple:

  1. you need a conversion server running. My RH7.x systems seem to come with Canna running, so that's what I use.
  2. kinput2 needs to be running with the XIM protocol enabled. I launch it with kinput2 -canna -xim
  3. mozilla needs the LANG variable set to Japanese at launch time before it will connect to kinput2 via the XIM protocol. I have a Mozilla button on my panel with the command:
    LANG=ja_JP XMODIFIERS=@im=kinput2 /usr/bin/mozilla
    The XMODIFIERS might not be necessary.
Once all that is in place, all I need to do is use the normal shift_space to turn kinput2 on and off when inputting into Mozilla.

Hope this helps

Jim

Jim Breen's Home Page and Japanese Page.