IBus is an Intelligent Input Bus. It is a new input framework for Linux. It provides a full featured and user friendly input method user interface. It also may help developers to develop input method easily. After installing at least one engine (e.g. PinYin engine) and enabling it in ibus-setup, ibus itself should be fully functional. If you want to use ibus as your primary input method, you should remove the scim package. If you use qt applications, then you probably want ibus-qt as well. To enable ibus put the following lines in your ~/.bashrc file: export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus ibus is pre-configured to autostart on xdg-compliant desktop environments if these settings are present. On other desktop environments you can add "ibus-autostart" to the respective autostart settings.