IBus is an open source and freely distributed software project that implements a free, intelligent, next generation input framework for all Linux kernel-based and UNIX-like operating systems.It doesn’t have a graphical user interface (GUI), as it’s only an input method framework for multilingual input in GNU/Linux and UNIX-like OSes.
Installing IBus is quite easy
If you’ve installed its dependencies, IBus can by acquired, compiled and installed using the source package found in our dedicated download section above. Save the package on your Home directory, uncompress it, open a Terminal app, and navigate to the location where you’ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/ibus-1.5.5).
Run the ‘./autogen.sh –prefix=’/usr’ –sysconfdir=’/etc’ –libdir=’/usr/lib’ –enable-gtk-doc’ command to configure the program, then run the ‘make’ command to compile it, and then run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide. If you want to install it from Git, use the ‘git clone git://github.com/ibus/ibus.git ibus’ command to grab the source code.
Getting started with IBus
After installation, you can run check the program’s usage message and available commands by running the ‘ibus’ command in a terminal emulator app. Available commands include engine, list-engine, read-cache, write-cache, watch, restart, address, help, version, and exit. To use it, you must add one of the aforementioned commands and an option to the ibus command.
As such, you can use the built-in commands to set of get the engine, to list available engines, to restart the ibus daemon, to display the content of registry cache, to create registry cache, as well as to print the D-Bus address of ibus daemon. Clients for the GTK+ 2.x, GTK+ 3.x, X11, and Wayland technologies will be available after installation.
