At the moment, an user under a Latin locale (English, Spanish, French, German) has no way to input Chinese, Japanese or Korean in applications like Open Office or Firefox.

The System>Administration>Language Support tools only set up scim if your session is in a language already using scim. Checking the Input Method box to activate complex characters input does nothing under a session using Latin characters. You will be able to type a CJK language in gedit, but not in OO or Firefox.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/scim/+bug/34282
and https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SCIM for a description of the problems and the ways to solve it for each version of Ubuntu. This steps have to be done in the main distribution, not on the user level, because they require editing system files.

CJK input has been offered by Microsoft since Windows XP - in 2008, it is still a thorn in the Ubuntu side.

For QA, each release should be tested in a few selected Latin locales (for example the most common - English, Spanish, French, German), with the user selecting Chinese, Japanese or Korean, enabling the input of complex characters, then launching Open Office and verifying that Ctrl-Space opens the scim bar, then deselecting the input and checking that everything has returned to normal.

One does NOT need any knowledge of foreign languages to check if it works - any English speaking developer can do the steps required.