Below is from the Maliit wiki. In the filesystem I only found the maliit-server binary so I guess we can safely forget about all the mentions of the 'legacy-mode'.

I've put both non-legacy-mode export commands in my .bashrc, rebooted, ran the server binay as requested (got 2 warning/error messages) in a terminal screen, ran Butaca, double clicked in an input field and see, a VKB appears, on a totally black background...

It's fully functional, but whatever you type doesn't appear on screen. Only when you click outside the vkb, you get back to the normal screen and you can see what you've typed.

It's a very good start

UPDATE: when for 2nd time calling the vkb it appears overlayed over the normal page and you can see the entered text correctly, as you type. This is all early game on Fremantle but very nice to see that things are actually working fine already. Thanks for all developers and testers involved so far !

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Input context
The Qt input context is loaded by setting the environment variable QT_IM_MODULE=Maliit

If running in legacy-mode, replace "Maliit" with "MInputContext"

The Gtk+ (optional) input context is loaded by setting the
GTK_IM_MODULE=meego-im

The Gtk+ module name is planned to be changed to Maliit in the near future.

Server
Note: You need to have a compositing window manager running to be able to use Maliit.

If running legacy-mode, replace "maliit-server" with "meego-im-uiserver".

In the future, it might be that the server can be autostarted by the input context.