Tor Browser Bundle on Ubuntu 13.10 is useless until/unless one manually kills the ibus process

[Damico]

After downloading and installing the 64-bit English Linux Tor Browser Bundle following the default Linux instructions located here (https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en), every user on Ubuntu 13.10 will find that the (secure) Tor browser will be useless because it will not accept *any* keyboard input.

That means, out of the box, on Ubuntu 13.10, the Tor Browser can not do anything whatsoever. You can't type a single URL into the URL bar at the top of the browser. Interestingly, other wholly unrelated browsers (such as the insecure Firefox browser) work just fine; so it's just the Tor Browser that is useless, out of the box.

Luckily, the workaround is to kill the ibus every time you plan on running the Tor Browser.
However, that workaround is highly unintuitive.

I searched Launchpad for a bug report, since EVERY SINGLE USER will have this problem, but, I didn't see any reports.
Perhaps I did the search wrong, in which case, please just duplicate this, since I don't have any special insight except that which is written above.

To reproduce this bug:
1. Install the Linux 64-bit English Tor Browser Bundle as per instructions on the Tor web pages.
2. Launch the Tor Browser.
3. Try to type something into the URL bar using the computer keyboard.
You will fail.

Then:
4. Kill the ibus.
5. Now, try to type something into the Tor Browser URL bar.
6. You will succeed.

This problem happens on no other operating system (to my knowledge) other than Ubuntu 13.10; hence this bug report is filed.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1272032/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Quinn Balazs (qbalazs)]

Report this on TOR's tracker (tracker.torproject.org). If
told the issue needs to be reported here, open a new ticket.

[Damico (damicoahr)]

That was a good idea.
It looks like this bug has a long history:
 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9353
I don't really understand all the details (I just know it happens), but it disables the user of Tor on all users on Ubuntu until/unless they implement a workaround.

[Damico (damicoahr)]

Reading all the comments of that bug, it seems that "something" in Debian is the culprit - but nobody knows what yet.
Here's the latest append, to that bug, for example:
-----< quote >-----
 Is anyone on Ubuntu 13.10 brave enough to try installing the Debian ibus and dbus packages (one at a time, so we know which is the culprit) to see if they fix this issue? You can download them from ​http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/dbus/dbus_1.7.10-2_amd64.deb and ​http://ftp.ca.debian.org/debian/pool/main/i/ibus/ibus_1.5.4-1_amd64.deb, but you may need to also pull in several dependencies and ibus input method subpackages too.

The reverse (trying the Ubuntu 13.10 ibus and dbus packages on Debian/testing) would also be helpful. An https version of the ubuntu pool can be found at ​https://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/.
-----< / quote >-----