How to type Chinese characters in Windows 2000/XP

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To enter Chinese characters in Linux you will need a program known as an Input Method Editor (IME). A popular IME for Linux is SCIM, which also supports many other writing systems. There are a few ways to obtain SCIM:

Download an RPM: take a look at your favourite RPM search engine for scim and scim-pinyin. The official Scim website is here: http://www.scim-im.org
Yum: if you're on Fedora like me then it's probably easiest just to use Yum. At the console switch to root (su root) and then run: "yum install scim" and then "yum install scim-pinyin"

In any case you'll notice that you need to download the core Scim engine first and then each IME seperately. Take a look at their website for a list of available languages.

Once you've downloaded and installed it, it should be ready for use. Try opening a text editor (gedit, for example) and right click to get the context menu. Go to 'Input Methods' and select 'Scim'。 Scim will have a default key combination for bringing up its control bar. Pressing ctrl+space should bring up a window like this:

Select the Chinese input method if it isn't already selected. If you can't see the Chinese method then you probably didn't install scim-pinyin. You should now be able to type Pinyin and see Hanzi. As you type, Scim will bring up a box allowing you to choose a character. It will attempt to guess the correct one, but where it gets it wrong you can correct it this way. Each character has a number by it; enter the number to select a character.