a wanderer in transit

Without switching to a Chinese locale (or having your menus and stuff switched to Chinese). These steps worked for me in Karmic.

Go to System > Administration > Language Support > Install / Remove Languages
Select Chinese (simplified) and check all the components available
From Synaptic Package Manager, install scim and scim-pinyin
Start Terminal and run im-switch -c and [...]

Karmic Koala popped out of the oven recently, and I decided to do my first upgrade. My gut told me that it was not a great idea to jump on Karmic so early, but my itchy fingers got ahead of me.
It was a Bad Idea™.
I should have done a trial run with the Live CD, [...]