[Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

(N.B.: This package is now available in the extras-devel Maemo repository)

Why do I care about M/SCIM?

For those interested in communicating in or learning languages that use complex characters, particularly Chinese, Japanese and Korean, but many others too, there exist special 'input methods' for the N900. Most are based on the SCIM project (called MSCIM in its Maemo incarnation, but SCIM is also used by some), and are distributed as Maemo packages, and use a special keyboard combination to switch between normal and additional input methods.

Unfortunately M/SCIM is a known battery hog. Furthermore, installing M/SCIM would normally disable the virtual keyboard and the symbol keyboard. Not any more!

On my phone, powertop shows that its 'scim-panel-gtk' process constantly wakes up the CPU many times per second when running. My N900 went from fully charged to switching itself off in around 5 hours on standby with it running recently.

Unfortunately, the process respawns immediately if killed, and nobody seems to know how to stop it. Last night I had the idea of sending the process a SIGSTOP signal, which effectively pauses it.

I scripted it up in Ash shell, and it seemed to work, so today I've coded a status menu applet to enable and disable MSCIM this way.

For now this is very alpha. You have been warned!

Usage

1. Bring up the status menu and click the Preferences icon, configure to your preference and then click Save.
2. Back at the status menu, you can select either "Hildon" or "MSCIM".
3. Depending on how you have configured the applet, When switching to Hildon the battery-hungry SCIM process may be suspended, or left running.
4. If, and only if, you have chosen to suspend the SCIM process in the configuration, any applications started under SCIM are likely to hang until SCIM is re-enabled.
5. Applications started while Hildon Input is active will not hang under any circumstances. However, they will not have access to SCIM input unless restarted while MSCIM is active.
6. Conversations and IM/SMS cannot be restarted without killing a process. If configured, this applet can do that for you.
7. In general, enabling M/SCIM again via the applet should always bring hung applications back to life.

Please see this post for instructions on how to make SCIM work best for you.

How does it work?

1. Taking this post of this thread as inspiration, I separated the GTK IM modules as suggested, creating two new templates in /etc/gtk-2.0/, named 'gtk.immodules_mscim_off' and 'gtk.immodules_mscim_on'.
2. My script/status menu applet symlinks the 'live' file /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules to the above file when changed
3. When disabling M/SCIM, after symlinking to 'off', the 'scim-panel-gtk' applet is sent a SIGSTOP, effectively pausing it.
4. When re-enabling, we symlink to 'on' and then the same process is sent a SIGCONT to wake it up.

Yes, this is all very inelegant, but I don't have time right now to see if M/SCIM can be optimised.

Possible future additions
In brainstorming, I was thinking that whenever the device goes off AC power it should warn the user and/disable M/SCIM.
Also, apart from using the device with TV out, we probably should stop M/SCIM whenever the screen is locked. Whether this can be done with a reduction in power consumption is another question.
When the keyboard slider is closed (except when bluetooth keyboard in use), would be another nice time to disable M/SCIM and allow use of the virtual keyboard.

All feedback/queries to this thread please.

Change Log for Updates/Corrections
v0.3.1

• Translations for Chinese Traditional (zh_HK & zh_TW) included.

v0.3.0

• Converted translations to GNU Gettext. Translations for French (fr_FR) and Chinese Simplified (zh_CN) included.

v0.2.1

• Selected an icon that all N900 users have installed (fixed the bug with mscimswitcherstatus disappearing after upgrade)
• Added some basic logging to help with troubleshooting

v0.2.0

• Finally with a user-friendly configuration dialog!

v0.1.1

• rtcom-messaging-ui now only killed if suspend of scim enabled in config.

v0.1.0

• Lots of built-in error handling to avoid malfunctions
• File /home/user/.config/mscimswitcherstatus/mscimswitcherstatus.conf allows you to set whether SCIM starts on boot
• Two new options below: can only be changed by editing /usr/lib/hildon-desktop/mscimswitcher_status.py: for now
• Can now set whether the 'scim-panel-gtk' process is suspended when switching to Hildon
• And if suspending, whether or not to kill 'rtcom-messaging-ui'

v0.0.5

• Removed extraneous 'kill' notification, left over from testing
• Now depends on either the 'scim' or the 'mscim' Maemo packages

v0.0.4

• All rtcom-messaging-ui processes are killed on each change of Input Method

v0.0.3

• Due to the omission of a file in /etc/sudoers.d from the package, earlier versions actually did not work, as the symlinking was denied by sudo policy
• Your /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules is backed up on install and restored on uninstall, also process 'scim-panel-gtk' is unsuspended on uninstall
• All files ownerships and permissions restricted appropriately

v0.0.2

• Minor update: M/SCIM will always be started after a reboot to prevent an inconsistent state arising

Screenshots

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

MSCIM is extremely eat battery as i know also, I uninstalled it long time.
I tried install again now see whether yours can improve or not
thx!

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

screenshots please!

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

@Xagoln
Thank you for the nice work. I just made a quick test - the "Conversation" seems to be unstable (application no response) after I disabled MSCIM. I tried this for 4 times (reboot + activate Conversation) and observed the same symptom. Any clue to fix this ?? Thanks, :)

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Screenshots moved to post #1

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

I found conversations to be a little unstable after switching to Hildon input. I killed 'rtcom-messaging-ui' and waited about 20 seconds for it to restart, and all was well.

Is your MSCIM disabled after reboot? And what do you get if you run this (please copy and paste output):

and...

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet (UPDATED)
 

This is awesome news. Exactly what I've been waiting for for the past few month! will definitely test when i get home.

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet (UPDATED)
 

@Xagoln
Sorry for the late response.
yes, I disabled MSCIM after reboot. Below are the output of code run after MSCIM disabled. FYI & thanks,

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet (UPDATED)
 

@shawwawa

Thanks for that Shawwawa. I had omitted to grant sudoers permissions for creating the symlinks required for MSCIM Switcher to actually work! They only allow the precise operation required, as you'll see if you install the latest package from post #1 and check /etc/sudoers.d/mscimswitcherstatus.sudoers

Please upgrade and re-test!

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet (UPDATED)
 

@Xagoln,
Thank you very much for your help. I'll update and test it ASAP. :)

Re: [Announce] MSCIM Switcher status menu applet (UPDATED)
 

My Conversations window froze after disabling MSCIM, so I clicked X to close, reopened and since then no problems.

May have to consider a smoother way to transition though. Please simply close Conversations with the X and reopen if you have problems - no need to reboot.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Thanks for packaging this. I have been using something similar for a while from another post, this is very helpful.

But isn't it necessary to kill rt-messaging-ui and browser/d since these two processes reside in memory?

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

You're most welcome.

I have not experienced problems with the browser, but yes I have noticed that Conversations can hang after disabling MSCIM, presumably because the app is connected to a process that is suspended. I mentioned this in the announcement.

I guess killing rtcom-messaging-ui is safe, apart from any half-typed messages in the chat window. I would like to see if there is a cleaner way also, of detaching from MSCIM somehow. Another idea I had was a middle layer between the input method and the apps, but that's probably unrealistic :D

Have you had problems with MicroB also, after disabling Hildon?

it would be nice to iron out the issues and get this into the repos for people who live in Asia, as it must really ruin the phone to have such short battery life and lose the nice features of Hildon input method!

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

I had Conversations freeze several times, so have reinstated 'killall rtcom-messaging-ui'. See post #1 of this thread for updated Debian package v0.0.4.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

@Xagoln,

I tested ver0.0.3-1 and it works without problem. I checked both hildon & MSCIM input in Conversation, email, MicroB and other web client app. - all got positive reactions with No operation lag. It's great that I could see the virtual keyboard now. haha~ Thank you very much and here I paste my check result of /etc/sudoers.d/mscimswitcherstatus as below, FYI.

user ALL = NOPASSWD: /bin/ln -sf /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules_mscim_on /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules
user ALL = NOPASSWD: /bin/ln -sf /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules_mscim_off /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules

p.s.: I just realize that you posted the ver0.0.4_1. Let me check this and keep you posted. Thanks. :)

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

@Xagoln,

I installed ver0.0.4-1 and reboot as usual. There is a "Kill" pop-up message appeared on desktop. Does it stand for "Killing" of the rtcom-messaging-ui ??

I checked the same way as I did in ver0.0.3-1, NO issue observed.

May I take the liberty of asking you to fix the "Kill" pop-up message during the system start-up ?! It's not supposed to be "good" when user should see it every time after system boot up. Sorry, it's just my personal opinion.

However, I would express my sincere appreciation for your great job on this. :D

p.s.: I'd been tried the way of Manual SCIM on/off switching, but it brought some issue to my N900 and I had to re-flash the system. haha~

http://freaxer.blogspot.com/2010/09/...-and-scim.html

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Thanks for the nice work of you. It's very better than another meathod, FYI, here is the url
http://wda.cn/thread-6248-1-1.html

樓主威武. hiahia

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Yes, that was a debugging message that I left in by mistake. Sorry - very sloppy of me. I've now removed the message, so grab version 0.0.5 from the first post. For some reason I didn't see the notification in my final testing, or somehow ignored it.

Thank you. I'm just glad if it helps a few people.

I will have a read of this blog now.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

I can't read Mandarin well enough to post information there - could you add a link to this thread perhaps?

我不明白你说什么:)

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

@Xagoln,

ver0.0.5-2 quick check done. The "Kill" message has gone and No abnormal issue observed. I made additional check on Contacts(Edit), File Manager, Opera11, cutetube-QML(search), Effing, Sociality and Fourcircle. The results are good as we expected.

Thank you very much for your good work, this certainly helps a lot of people. :)

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

This thread is the same as " http://freaxer.blogspot.com/2010/09/...-and-scim.html ", and it added some tips to switch with the “queen beecon widget”.


p.s. I am sorry that I thought you were Chinese, so post the chinese vocabulary of ”楼主威武“, it means "posting person is mighty". :( Forgive my broken English.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

@Sunbeam: no I am not Chinese, but I am on my way to China in a few days by bicycle (started cycling from UK 10 months ago, and right now I'm in Thailand), so I am trying to learn 普痛话 (and N900 is wonderful for this, with MStarDict and MSCIM!)

And no problems with your English! :)

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Basically I got no problem. Just want is the killall problem make the conversations always reload when switching hildon and mscim

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Interestng. I've been using MSCIM + Hangul since it first came out. I never had battery life issues. (and I have mine overclocked to 1.1Ghz as well. lol) Hmm. Mine will last 2-3 days if I use it only ~30mins a day. But yeah, this is cool still.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Are you saying that you think we shouldn't kill the Conversations windows when switching? And are you using the most recent version (v0.0.5-2)?

Did you find that Conversations windows freeze if they are not restarted?

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

If you install and run Powertop, you'll see that scim-panel-gtk wakes up the CPU very often, and prevents it from spending much time in the C4 (deep sleep) state.

If you've had no problems with battery life, then your battery life should be even better than before now.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

@Xagoln
when I try you appliction, I find...You forget two depend :
python-hildondesktop
hildon-desktop-python-loader

those two package is depend by many status plugin so mass people have installed them, but I not.....

And, I have checked it work well with my MCIP input-method, so thanks.:)

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Thanks foolegg, I have now added those two packages to the dependencies. I have not uploaded a new package yet, but will upload later today.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

I havent tried the old version before, I just tried .52 version, I havent got conversations freezing, just I know is killall conversation will make the conversation always reload again when switching hildon and mscim mode.

Is it possible not to killall conversations that can make conversations not freeze? Conversation reload is a little bit unconvinence.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

I've had an idea that could fix this.

If we separate 'suspending' the scim-panel-gtk process from switching input methods.

A new button would allow battery-saving on/off.

I will see if it works that way.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

NEW VERSION 0.1.0: Change Log
v0.1.0

• Lots of built-in error handling to avoid malfunctions
• File /home/user/.config/mscimswitcherstatus/mscimswitcherstatus.conf allows you to set whether SCIM starts on boot
• Two new options below: can only be changed by editing /usr/lib/hildon-desktop/mscimswitcher_status.py: for now
• Can now set whether the 'scim-panel-gtk' process is suspended when switching to Hildon
• And if suspending, whether or not to kill 'rtcom-messaging-ui'

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Well, if you're like me, you use SCIM only rarely and most of the time, battery life and the symbol/virtual keyboards are more important.

I spent all of yesterday looking for ways to allow on-the-fly switching of input methods (i.e. between Hildon and SCIM). I tried SCIM bridge, Qimsys and even tried making symlinks to the actual input method binaries, so that they could be redirected with ln. None of these worked, unfortunately. If I understand correctly, when a Hildon/GTK application is launched, it links to the .so file of the first input method listed in /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules. What is needed is a layer between application and input method. SCIM Bridge looked interesting, but did not work in that way.

In the meantime, applications started using hildon-input-method obviously are unaffected by suspending SCIM, so that's how I wanted my system to be.

To run an application where I'll use SCIM input, I simply enable MSCIM before launching the application.

In order for SCIM to be available in the X session, I found it was necessary to symlink the SCIM version of /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules into place briefly at boot, start the SCIM daemon and then symlink the Hildon version back into place. This will happen automatically if you disable "SCIM active on boot" in the Preferences dialog.

The "Suspend SCIM panel when Hildon active" option will pause the process that wakes up the CPU. This will save battery, but will cause apps to freeze until MSCIM is reenabled or they are restarted.

The "Kill RTCOM on suspend" option is only useful if you are suspending SCIM's process. It will kill the processes of the Conversations/IM/SMS windows, which can't be restarted by simply reopening their windows like most apps.

N.B.:an application started with SCIM active will still not get the virtual/symbol keyboards until closed and relaunched (tricky for Conversations). Likewise, an application launched with Hildon input method will not gain access to SCIM without restarting, after enabling SCIM.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

v0.1.1 Change Log
* rtcom-messaging-ui will now only be killed if both of the following conditions are true:

1. You have configured for the SCIM process to be suspended when switching to Hildon
2. You have configured for 'rtcom-messaging-ui' to be killed on suspend/unsuspend

See the preceding post for more details on how to do this.

I probably won't be making any more updates for a while now, unless there are any serious bugs.

In a later release it would be nice to add localisation, so that messages display in peoples' native language, as well as make changing the configuration more user-friendly.

I highly recommend updating from any version earlier than 0.1.1.

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Version 0.2.0 Change Log

• Finally, a user-friendly configuration/Preferences dialog - no more need to edit the script or configuration file by hand! \o/

It'd be great if people could test it as it will soon be going into extras-devel.

This time there really won't be updates any time soon, except in case of serious problems! :)

Get it from Post #1 of this thread:

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...40&postcount=1

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

After updated, the mscimswitcher is missing at status menu

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

I got the same problem, MSCIMswitcher disappeared @statusmenu ~ haha :)

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

uninstall and install again?

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

Aaarghhh!

Hmm, any chance you could help me troubleshoot?

First we should try this:
Wait a few seconds for it to restart and then check again. Do you have a lot of items on your menu? Installing a new package will cause it to move from its usual position.

If there is still no sign of it, try:


If you could run the following commands and then send the file mscimtest.tar.gz to me it would be very useful:

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

I already done killall and even reboot also nil help.
I dont have many item in status menu, previous version also ok, just this version not ok

Re: [Announce] Easily input Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters without killing your standby time or losing VKB with MSCIM Switcher status menu applet
 

pkill not working