aashiks'in

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

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 The scim-tables package in the current arch official repos are outdated and does not include swanalekha input method.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.