For the past couple of days, SCIM seems to be enabled by default in the latest development builds of Ubuntu Hardy. SCIM is a platform that takes care of handling different input methods. But I really don’t need to type vietnamese, russian, or any other exotic language. Another annoyance is that the keybindings can conflict with other applications, which makes it even more cumbersome to use. Trying to close SCIM from the system tray by selecting “Exit” doesn’t work, it just restarts the application in less than a second.. So, how do we go about disabling this once and for all?

Type this in your console: “sudo update-alternatives –set xinput-all_ALL /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default” .

Restarting X should show you a scim-less systray!

Now let’s hope the Ubuntu guys remove this crap by default again before Hardy hits GA ;)