Cantonese IME for Windows 10

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There are not many decent Cantonese IME around. The best option for Windows 7 and before are CPIME. It borderline worked for Windows 8/10 (desktop mode only), but I heard recently Windows 10 broke it in its 1903 update.

Dr. Choi kindly wrote another Cantonese IME called CAP, which I came across while looking for Cantonese IME for Linux. This is the only option that works with Windows 10 natively (apps and desktop).

Getting CAP 2018 to install
[Deprecated, please use CAP 2021 instead, see below]

Unfortunately the installer failed on a fresh Windows 10, saying that “CAP.dll” cannot be registered. I looked at the error code and it usually suggest a missing dependency for the DLL. I used Dependency Walker to look at what’s broken and noticed those are Visual C++ 2015 DEBUG runtime DLLs. Since debug builds aren’t suppose to have a redistributable runtime (it’s actually called NonRedist), the only solution is to install the community edition of Visual C++ 2015 to obtain these DLLs.

Note that “Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015” must be included (installed) so the IME won’t be broken (grayed):

The cause is the missing UCRTBASED.DLL. The files are located at:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin

It’s under the (x86) variant of Program Files regardless of whether it’s 32-bit or 64-bit.

The missing link to API-MS-WIN-CORE-PATH-L1-1-0.DLL is not important.

After you installed the IME after installing Visual C++ 2015 (any flavor, minimal is OK), you can remove Visual C++ 2015 without breaking the IME, EXCEPT you need to back up the UCRTBASED.DLL first and put it next to the core CAP.DLL file for the IME:

C:\Program Files\Sixth Happiness\CAP\x64

Getting CAP 2021 to install

CAP 2021 still won’t install on fresh installation of Windows 10, and I ran it through Dependency Walker and noticed it’s missing VCRUNTIME140_1.dll. Based on this post, this is part of the Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 Redistributable:

Microsoft rolled the runtimes for 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2022 into one package, so if you want missing 2019 runtime DLLs, you might as well install it. This time the package didn’t use any debug version of the runtime like in 2018, which makes life much easier.

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Locale Emulator replaced pAppLocale / AppLocale

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I have an ancient SONY NW-507 MP3 player (I still love it because of the 60hrs battery life) that the MP3 Manager software just interpret ANSI names encoded in the ID3 tag based on whatever system language the program started on.

I used to use AppLocale for that. There was a better variant called pAppLocale (or paip Applocale) but it’s no longer maintained anymore. Today I discovered a modern, much more powerful equivalent called Locale Emulator.

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Windows 10 setup notes

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  • Microsoft Edge does default search provider is set using opensearch: you need to go to www.Google.com first before the Google option is available in the “Change Search Provider” lists. Otherwise all you’ll see is a disabled option
  • EasyBCD messes up the boot menu under UEFI. VisualBCD Editor is too low level. Use BootICE instead: it’s simple and free. It was designed for up to Windows 8.1, but it works for Windows 10.

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Linux Mint Setup Notes

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Open Keyboard settings and add application/custom shortcuts:

Thunar file manager has the location/address shown as buttons. Use shortcut Ctrl+L to enable typing.

To move along GUI tabs, use Ctrl+PageUp/Down in Linux instead of Ctrl+(Shift)+Tab in Windows.

To expand/contract GUI trees, use Shift+Left/Right instead of simply Left/Right in Windows

 

Most Linux come with Samba Client (smbclient) installed that allows you to access Windows shares, the Samba Server is typically not installed by default, therefore you will need to do more work to share Linux folders with Windows. Here are the tools for a more complete experience:

  • Smb4k for viewing network shares (or use smbtree)
  • Nemo-share enables right-click to share in Cinnamon’s default file manager (nemo)

For some reason, after installing and uninstalling samba and smbclient a few times, Linux Mint stopped connecting to Windows computer (yet other SMB running MX linux can be accessed fine), despite this worked fine out of the box.

Turns out it’s this flaw (not in MX linux) that it cannot negotiate with newer SMB versions that might have been addressed but it can stuck being unable to negotiate with Windows 7 (it has SMB1 and SMB2 enabled) under certain conditions. After placing “client max protocol = NT1” in smb.conf and reboot, it worked, then I removed the line and reboot and it still worked afterwards. Weird!

Linux Mint 19 also does not resolve local hostnames from DNS right out of the box (also the live CD boot) because it came with systemd-resolve which does not handle local hostnames resolution right away.

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Windows 10 computers accessing file shares from Windows 2008 / Windows 7 Negotiations between different versions of SMB that came with different Windows

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Windows 10 cannot access network file shares of older Windows (7 and before) out of the box, and I’m not impressed that Microsoft let millions of users waste their productivity to figure it out.

The issue is caused by SMB negotiatons. Basically at the time of writing, there are 3 major versions of SMB:

Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 Windows 7 / 2008 Windows 8 / 10
SMB v1 (No encryption) Default Default (for backward compatibility) Need to turn on SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support
SMB v2 X Enable SMB2 in registry (for 2008) Default (for backward compatibility)
SMB v3 X X Default

More accurately, this blog post provides the negotiation chart for up to Windows 8 (think of Windows 10 is the same for now).

Turn on SMB 1.0 in newer Windows (8, 10 and above):

The SMB v1 does not have encryption, therefore a security risk. Makes sense to disable it unless there’s a compelling reason (like obsolete industrial computer under tightly controlled network).

SMB v2 might need to be enabled by registry in Windows 2008 if not already done so:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
SMB2 (DWORD): 1 for enable, 0 for disable

This web page tells you how to turn on/off each SMB version individually.

 

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