Comment 5 for bug 663776

With natty alpha-3 and unity-2d 3.6.2-0ubuntu1~bzr449:

I can enable iBus for Chinese/CN pinyin (in unity-2d Search box and in other places) with Ctrl + Space after:
 * installing Chinese from Language Selector (including input methods)
 * setting Chinese as default by dragging it above English and pressing "Apply System Wide"
 * manually* setting the LANG variable in /etc/default/locale, for example: LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8

I believe that manual step should not be necessary and this is the root bug.

This variable is NOT set by Language Support (it was still en_US.UTF-8, my language choice on natty install), even after Chinese installation and selection as default.

I think Ubuntu is transitioning away from LANG to LANGUAGE and other more standard locale variables.

The correction may be to let iBus use the LANGUAGE env var instead of LANG to determine the current locale.

(Indeed all apps that use LANG should transition to LANGUAGE or they too may suffer locale confusion.)