About fcitx5, and recent environment variable issues

What happened

I recently received a message like this

For those who use $HOME/.pam_environment to set environment variables, take note! Due to CVE-2010-4708, pam upstream is set to not read user’s environment variable settings by default in version 1.4.0, and users are required to change their environment variable settings or restore the original default read behavior.

ref: Linux environment variables how to set Evian’s Blog

Why is the 10-year vulnerability only now fixed? Emmmm, so that’s what the vulnerability is.

Emmmm, so that is .pam_environment this file can not be used ……

Here thanks to lilydjwg for writing out the way to deal with various situations

I’ll write a note about replacing fcitx5 in xfce + lightdm environment… Other specifics can be found in what lilydjwg wrote… (Escape

fcitx5 vs fcitx

• Fcitx

Fcitx (Flexible Input Method Framework) ── i.e. Little Penguin Input Method, which is an input method distributed under GPL wiki/Input_method) platform, which can support multiple input methods by installing the engine, and supports simple input and output, it is a common Chinese input method in Linux OS. It has the advantage of being short and compact, and has good compatibility with programs.

— Arch Wiki

• Fcitx5

Fcitx5 is the next generation input method framework after Fcitx.

— Arch Wiki

Daily lazy, direct quotes (flee

Okay, let’s get right to it

first post my system situation

Operating system: Arch Linux

Desktop environment: xfce

Display Manager: lightdm

Actually, just writing the input method environment variables from .pam_environment to .xprofile will solve the problem, but I’d like to try fcitx5.

Uninstall the old version fcitx

First of all, we need to uninstall the original fcitx, I was using fcitx-googlepinyin input method before, so I need to uninstall this package too, because there will be dependency.

Besides, all the packages that have some relationship with fcitx should be uninstalled, otherwise pacman will report error, so you have to execute this

(PS: you may not use Google input method, so please change fcitx-googlepinyin to the package name of the input method you installed)

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sudo pacman -Rs fcitx-configtool fcitx-googlepinyin fcitx-qt5 fcitx

Next, delete this file, it’s useless anyway (escape

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$ sudo rm -rf . /.pam_environment

Installing fcitx5

Now to install fcitx5, this is how to do it

• fcitx5

  • The main package, no need to explain

• fcitx5-chinese-addons

  • Chinese input method package …. Arch Wiki explains it like this.

    fcitx5-chinese-addons contains a lot of Chinese input methods: Pinyin, ShuangPin, WubiPinyin, Natural Code, CangJie, BingToad Holographic, ErBi, etc.

• fcitx5-im

  • Environment dependency package, you have to install it, otherwise you can’t type on some software

• fcitx5-configtool

  • fcitx5’s GUI configuration tool, because I don’t know how to modify the configuration file, so I installed this. Install it after the three above.

Then, execute

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$ sudo pacman -S fcitx5 fcitx5-chinese-addons fcitx5-im fcitx5-configtool

After the package is installed, it will theoretically boot up, but well, there can be some metaphysical problems, so do this manually first

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$ sudo cp /usr/share/applications/fcitx5.desktop ~/.config/autostart/ -v

Environment variables

Well, finally it’s set environment variable, since .pam_environment can’t be used, where to write it?

lilydjwg said:

Using X11 desktop environment, usually login through display manager, such as lightdm and sddm. Both of them support ~/.xprofile. This file will be sourced during boot, using a shell determined by dm itself. Both lightdm and sddm use /bin/sh (in the files /etc/lightdm/Xsession and /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsession respectively). As you can see, in addition to reading .xprofile, lightdm also reads .profile. sddm even reads the startup configuration scripts for bash, zsh, tcsh, and fish.

That is, we need to write the fcitx5 environment variables in the .xprofile file

Then…

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$ vim . /.xprofile

Write these things in it

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export INPUT_METHOD=fcitx5
export GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx5
export QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx5
export XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx5

Next you can choose to restart lightdm,

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$ sudo systemctl restart lightdm

Or reboot the system.

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$ sudo reboot

At this time, a keyboard appears in the status bar of xfce, but pressing CTRL + SPACE but it does not bring up the Chinese input method, so what should we do?

Right-click the keyboard icon, click Configure, and then go to the QT configuration tool to add Chinese input methods on it!

Just double click to add to the left ~

Then click OK and start enjoying fcitx5!

Reference links

• How to set environment variables for Linux - Evian’s Blog
• Fcitx5 (Simplified Chinese) - ArchWiki
• Fcitx - Wikipedia
• Fcitx (Simplified Chinese) - ArchWiki

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)