The Intelligent Input Bus (IBus) is an input method framework for multilingual input in Unix-like operating systems. It's called "Bus" because it has a bus-like architecture.
You can use IBus to type in your own language in most GUI applications.
Installation
One may install the following packages to add the respective languages to IBus:
ibus-pinyin - Provides pinyin.
ibus-sunpinyin - Provides sunpinyin.
ibus-m17n - Provides amharic, arabic, armenian, assamese, athapascan languages, belarusian, bengali, burmese, central khmer, chamic languages, chinese, cree, croatian, czech, danish, divehi, dhivehi, maldivian, esperanto, french, georgian, ancient greek (to 1453), modern greek (1453-), gujarati, hebrew, hindi, inuktitut, japanese, kannada, kashmiri, kazakh, korean, lao, malayalam, marathi, nepali, ojibwa, oriya, panjabi, punjabi, persian, pushto, pashto, russian, sanskrit, serbian, sichuan yi, nuosu, siksika, sindhi, sinhala, sinhalese, slovak, swedish, tai languages, tamil, telugu, thai, tibetan, uighur, uyghur, urdu, uzbek, vietnamese, as well as yiddish.
Running IBus
If IBus doesn't automatically startup at login then you need to add it to startup applications list.
Open System > Preferences > Startup Applications
- Click on the "Add" button
- Write command as: "ibus-daemon"
- Click on the "Add" button
Setting up your Language
Go to System->Preferences->Ibus Preferences.
- Go to 'Input Method' tab
- Select your language from the drop down menu and click 'Add button'
- Move it up to the top so that whenever you run ibus you will be directly able to type in your language.
- Close
Using IBus
To use IBus open any GUI application e.g. gedit, LibreOffice Writer etc. Press CTRL + SPACE and start typing.
Note
For Indian language users it is suggested that you use 'itrans' layout. Its easy to learn and very fast to type. e.g. typing 'bhaarat' will give you 'भारत'
More IBus Resources
The IBus project is hosted on GitHub
IRC: channel #ibus on irc.freenode.net