I have a Chinese friend who prefers Apple because you
can switch the language on the fly but her pc went dead. Very dead. I was going
to set her up with a laptop with ubuntu on it and just for asthetics I wanted to
mimick the apple os/x she is used to.

I have fooled around in 9.04 with the language settings
from the start menu and I guess to change it to any number of languages you
simply select it from the menu and it changes the global input language. What I
do not know how to do is to set the keyboard input to Pinyin. That would be
welcome advice.