How to input Japanese in Debian?

Question

I have a serious issue in inputting Japanese in Debian distribution via xterm I configured the following file:

 /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

with the following:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "keyboard-all"
    Driver "evdev"
    Option "XkbLayout" "us,it,jp"
    Option "XkbOptions" "grp:shift_toggle"
    MatchIsKeyboard "on"
EndSection

which would enable 3 input languages: English Italian and Japanese from the keyboard when running xterm or anything similar I can input English and Italian but not Japanese. I tried installing a lot of Japanese font packages but nothing worked for me. Can any one help me with this issue, because I am almost trying to make this work for more than one week! what is so special in Japanese language that it couldn't be inputted via the keyboard?!

I don't want to install any thing that needs any GUI interaction only scripting.

thanks for any help given.

Solution

Disclaimer: I do not speak Japanese. This answer is solely based on rough ideas on East Asian languages that deals with kanji, specifically the two written Mandarin Chinese standards.

Japanese support is far more than keyboard layouts – you get two phonetic writing systems (kana, both of which needs ~50+ glyphs), and three thousand-ish ideographs (kanji) that are usually indexed by searching phonetic sequences. There is no way to have a single keyboard layout to handle this much characters (unless you decide to go with Google's 2010 April Fool prank), so you have to use an imput method to help you.

Debian's guide on Japanese Environment suggests using ibus-mozc for input. You will need to relogin to X after sudo apt install ibus-mozc, and you should then set up ibus to use the mozc input method. You should be able to do it in command line by playing with dconf: where is config file of ibus stored?

For TTY input, use the framebuffer terminal ibus-fbterm. You usually need huge kernel font patches for displaying kanji natively in TTY, but fbterm does the job for you in framebuffer.

I am not entirely sure about how the IM works, so you may need to read this wikipedia page for some ideas on using it.

Comments

[flashDisk]

thanks for your help and reply, I appreciate it. I will be digging into it but one question can all this configurations be done only via scripting without any GUI interaction?!

[Mingye Wang]

@flashDisk ibus stores its config in dconf, so it should be possible if you follow that question I linked to.