How do I change the input method in guest session?

Question

I like the concept of having a guest account on the computer, but one thing I would like to know is, if the guest account is customizable? Particularly the language input settings?

Answer 1

Please see the tutorial Customize Guest Session. As regards language input, the line

echo 'setxkbmap se,us' >> $HOME/.profile

in /etc/guest-session/prefs.sh is an example of how the keyboard layout for the guest sessions may be specified.

Edit:

From your comment I understand that you need to use e.g. IBus. I'm pretty sure it can be done, but I'm on 13.10 now, where the input method configuration works differently, so I can't easily figure out the details.

What's most important, I suppose, is to make sure that IBus is started automatically when you launch a guest session, so that the IBus icon shows up on the menu bar. That should be the case if Chinese is your system wide display language.

Edit II:

Assuming that your system default display language is en_US, you may want to try these steps:

• Create the folder /etc/guest-session
• Create the file /etc/guest-session/prefs.sh and give it the following contents:

# start the IBus daemon automatically
mkdir -p $HOME/.xinput.d
ln -s /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/ibus $HOME/.xinput.d/en_US
chown -R $USER:$USER $HOME/.xinput.d

Hopefully that will make the IBus icon show up on the menu bar when you launch a guest session.

Edit III:

I have just rewritten the previously mentioned tutorial. With the new approach to customizing the guest session feature, this question (and many similar questions) are answered much more easily than before.

So a version neutral answer to this question may now be:

• Create a special purpose user in accordance with the tutorial.
• When logged in to the special user account, change the input method settings (and possibly the keyboard layout settings too) to your liking.
• Done.

I tested this successfully on Ubuntu 14.04, and I believe the chances are good that it works fine on 12.04 as well.