Typing Thai

[bentrein]

For the record, I use Fedora 9 X86_64, and I'm a near complete Linux noob.

The installation went fairly fine, although skype still gives me sound, but no microphone. Other than that, I'm (almost) ok. The only real problem is that I still can't type in Thai. It displays Thai fine (afik), especially online. But I can't type Thai.

Please give me some advice on how to enable it!

[slackula]

This seems to be a solution:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=204232

specifically: yum install scim-lang-thai

Googling for "fedora 9 X86_64 thai language support" without quotes is quite instructive

If you are very new to the world of GNU/Linux you should be warned that Fedora is a testing platform; therefore it is subject to frequent updates, some of which are quite important. You might be better served by a more reliable or better tested distro. But that is just my humble opinion.

[hegenious]

For the record, I use Fedora 9 X86_64, and I'm a near complete Linux noob.

The installation went fairly fine, although skype still gives me sound, but no microphone. Other than that, I'm (almost) ok. The only real problem is that I still can't type in Thai. It displays Thai fine (afik), especially online. But I can't type Thai.

Please give me some advice on how to enable it!

Ok, here's how I did it in Ubuntu (assuming Fedora uses the same Gnome Desktop, the following walkthrough should apply to Fedora as well).

right-click on the Panel (taskbar) and choose 'Add to Panel'. Scroll down in the dialog box that opens, and click the Keyboard indicator Item; then click the Add to Panel button at the bottom of the dialog.

You now have a new button on your Panel (the bar that is similar to the windows taskbar), displaying your default keyboard language. In my case, it says 'USA', that is my default layout.

Now, right-click that new button, and choose 'Keyboard Preferences' from the menu that opens.

A dialog window opens, go to the second tab, labeled 'Layouts'.

There, click on the big plus (+), and a 'Choose Layout' dialog will be presented to you. Hold on, you're almost done.

In this window, you can choose keyboard layouts for any Country or Language. Choose Thailand and click the Add button at the bottom of the dialog. Thai layout has been added to your keyboard!!

Close the 'Keyboard Preferences' dialog, after you made sure that the layout you use the most often is selected as the default.

Now, to start typing Thai like a pro, all you have to do is click the 'Keyboard Indicator' button on the taskbar to instantly toggle kb layouts. In my case, I can toggle between USA and Tha

Hope this was helpful to you.

[autonomous_unit]

I always select "Thai" in the language support list while installing Fedora onto the system. From looking at yum and rpm outputs, I think "scim-lang-thai" is the main package to install to get the equivalent function. However, I am looking at a Fedora 10 Preview system rather than Fedora 9...

If you are using the normal Fedora GNOME desktop, you can do this which is the same basic approach described by hegenious, but going through the system preferences menu to get there:

1. From the desktop menu bar, select System->Preferences->Hardware->Keyboard and a window pops up.
   
2. In the new window, select the tab called Layouts.
   
3. Click the Add button.
   
4. Choose the default entry for Thailand or Thai language, and click the Add button when the displayed keyboard looks right.
   
5. Now that multiple layouts are listed, click an item in the column labeled Default to choose your default layout.
   
6. Click the Layout Options button, and then click the small triangle to expand the entry called Layout Switching
   

You will see many different hot-key combinations and one should already be selected. You can change or add additional combinations to easily toggle between layouts. My wife seems to prefer "Both Alt keys together change layout". I don't know if that was a common Windows behavior here or why she likes it... see hegenious's post for how to add a panel button to change layouts via mouse instead of via keyboard...