aashiks'in

This is old news, but still :

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing had brought out a newer release of the fonts they maintain on July 15 – release announcement is here .

I maintain an AUR script that can be used to install the fonts. I updated in on July 16 , but never did post it anywhere else except on the SMC mailinglist. I am putting this post up here for users who are looking for ways to install Malayalam fonts on their Arch Linux powered computers

I assume that you have installed yaourt. If you have not yet, please do install it. AUR is the install script repository for packages maintained by other Arch users, and yaourt is one of the best tools to install and manage packages from AUR.

To install the latest version of the malayalam fonts, issue the following command from a terminal.

yaourt -S ttf-malayalam-fonts

From a discussion on ilug-tvm mailinglist

Prerequisites : yaourt should be installed

Installing the server

Step 1: Issue the following command on a terminal and answer whatever questions may pop up. This will install the dictd server to your system: yaourt -S dict-freedict-eng-mal

Step 2: start the dictd server by issuing the following command :
* If you have sudo installed , then : sudo /etc/rc.d/dictd start
* else become super user by typing in su at a terminal and inputting the super user password . Now run /etc/rc.d/dictd start

Step 3 [ optional ] : If you wish to use the server quiet frequently, you might want to have it running always.  For that, add dictd to the end of DAEMONS list in your rc.cof

eg: (syslog-ng dbus hal @cpufreq @net-profiles @network @netfs @crond alsa @sshd @dictd)

The @ makes your process startup in backround and init wont wait for the startup to complete before proceeding .

Installing the client :

I use a client called dikt. I installed it by issueing the following command  : yaourt -S dikt. Once this is complete, startup dikt. Click on Settings>Configure Dikt. In the window that pops up , you can add your own dict servers. Just type in ‘localhost’  and add it to the servers list. It will be better if you can move the dict.org entry or  you can remove the dict.org entry if you will be using only English-Malayalam dictionary. Now you can start using dikt to lookup words.

I know the whole thing looks a little tedious, but this is what i did ,  and it works

I wrote a small plasmoid that will display fortune cookies from fortune-ml database for the fortune program. A new cookie appears every 30 minutes or on every click on the plasmoid.

Santhosh put the code into smc git yesterday. The plasmoid is written in Python and is generic enough that it will accept any fortune database. I have hardcoded it ( for now ) to use fortune-ml though. Until I figure out how to create dialogues in pyQT and learn to use the KDE configuration framework, its going to be just fortune-ml.The code is pretty straight forward. More time was spent looking up APIs and Python stuff than actually writing it down

Thanks to Praveen for testing the code and Santhosh for creating the fortune-ml database.

Summary : Plasmoid written in pyQT, depends on : KDE 4.2 , fortune-ml (available in SMC git )

Enabling Malayalam on Mandriva Linux 2009 is slightly different from Mandriva 2008 . I am using an installation from  Mandriva One 2009 KDE version disc

This is how you do it :

Download and install latest Meera and Rachana from
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/smc/fonts/malayalam-fonts-04/ .
Installing involves right clicking on the file and choosing actions->install. ( This is with KDE, something similar should be there on GNOME )

1. Invoke the Mandriva Control Centre [ Menu->Tools->System Tools->Configure your Computer ] choose Software Management -> ‘Install & Remove Software ‘
2. There are two drop down lists on the top left , choose ‘All’ in both .
3. Search for scim-tables-ml and select it.
4. Accept the dependencies. It will also ask you to choose from scim-, scim-bridge, and skim. Just choose scim
5. Click on Apply.
6. Invoke the Mandriva Control Centre [ Menu->Tools->System Tools->Configureyour Computer ] choose System->’Manage localization for your System’ . Now choose Malayalam in the Window that shows up. Click next and carry on with the default choices to complete the wizard. When the last Ok button is clicked, it will present you with a logout/restart/shudown window. Click logout.
7. Log in now
8. Open up a terminal ( ALT+F2 invokes a run dialogue and then type in ’konsole’  (without quotes) in it and press enter )
9. Type in ‘su -’  (without quotes)  and enter your root password when prompted.
10. Now run ‘kwrite /etc/sysconfig/i18n’ (without quotes)
11. Add the following text to its end

GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
XIM_PROGRAM=”scim -d”
QT_IM_MODULE=scim
XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM

Now  Logout and log back in.

The scim icon should be there in the system tray and you should be able to type in Malayalam anywhere now, just by pressing Control+Spac and choosing Swanalekha/inscript  from the input method list that pops up.

SMC released an English-Malayalam Dictionary for dict servers. I have made a package so any Arch – Malayalam (!!!)  users out there can use it. You can get the PKGBUILD from AUR.  If you have yaourt installed, you just have to run
yaourt -S dict-freedict-eng-mal
in a terminal.

I have also built a package that is available here. You can download and install it using
pacman -U dict-freedict-eng-mal-0.1-2-i686.pkg.tar.gz

I have packaged, rather created the PKGBUILD scripts for Malayalam fonts (from SMC repos) and the latest scim-tables for Arch Linux. Both PKGBUILDs are hosted at the AUR repository. The fonts package are just that – the fonts from SMC repos. The scim-tables package in the current arch official repos are outdated and does not include swanalekha input method.  So I created a PKGBUILD script for it and put it up in AUR. Please verify and vote for these packages if you have tested them and they work well. [ Update : scim-tables might go into the official repositories as per this ]

There are two ways to go about installing packages from AUR.

1) Get the PKGBUILD from AUR and create a package yourself. Then install it using pacman. This involves the following things

• Get the PKGBUILD and put it in a directory
• Open a terminal and execute the following commands

cd Directory/where/PKGBUILD/resides
makepkg # This creates the package.
sudo pacman -U pkgname # pkgname is the name of the file that makepkg just created.


2) The easy way is to install yaourt from AUR first and use it to search and install the packages. After installing yaourt run the following commands in a terminal.

yaourt -S scim-tables-v0.5.8

yaourt -S ttf-malayalam-fonts

These are the standard ways of getting these packages. I have hosted the fonts package alone  here .You can download it and then use the ‘pacman -U’ switch to install it like above. The scim-tables package is too big to be put up here.

Report bugs to aashiks at the rate gmail dot com.

I tried installing Malayalam on Mandriva Spring 2008. It turned out to be easy.

Step 1 : Install Mandriva

Step 2 : Log in and update your system from Menu->Tools->System Tools->Configure your Computer

Step 3 : From from Menu->Tools->System Tools->Configure your Computer choose ‘install & Remove Software ‘

Step 4 : There are two drop down lists on the top left , choose ‘All’ in both .

Step 5: search for scim-tables-ml and select it

Step 6: Accept the dependencies. It will also ask you to choose from scim-, scim-bridge, and skim.I chose SKIM.

Step 7 : Click on Apply .

Step 8 : After software finishes installation, search for scim-qtimm Or scim-gtk and select it

Step 9 : Accept the dependencies , click on apply and wait for software install to complete.

Step 10 : Download and install latest Meera and Rachana from http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/smc/fonts/malayalam-fonts-04/ . Installing involves right clicking on the file and choosing actions->install

Step 11: open a console . become root user by typing ‘su’ (without quotes ) , and then typing in your admin password when prompted.

Step 12 : Run the following commands one by one

echo ‘GTK_IM_MODULE=scim’ >> /etc/sysconfig/i18n
echo ‘XIM_PROGRAM=”scim -d”‘ >> /etc/sysconfig/i18n
echo ‘QT_IM_MODULE=scim’ >> /etc/sysconfig/i18n
echo ‘XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM’ >> /etc/sysconfig/i18n

Step 13: Reboot your system

Step 14: Log in . There should be a keyboard icon on the taskbar . You can click on it and choose your input method

Step 15: Send mails to friends and tell them that GNU is awesome.

Some issues :

Hitch number 1 : Firefox rendering is shit. libpango is v1.20 . How do i fix this ?
Hitch number 2 : Open office doesnt have ml language pack.