If the situation only appears in your liveCD, it 's OK because of the limitation of the ISO size. The inatallation framework will download extra packages according to your preferred language during the installation process. If you still cannot type Chinese characters after installation, check whether fcitx/ibus is installed. If so, try im-config which is available in the official repositories or simply define the environment variables: GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx