Swanalekha is a scim malayalam phonetic input method.We can type malayalam easily using swanalekha as it uses transliteration based input method!
Iam going to explain(not really :p) how i installed swanalekha in my gentoo installation!
As it is scim based, swanalekha definitely needs scim,so we have to install it frist.To install it you can use emerge command.it downloads and compiles its source and solves dependecies by itself,so need to worry about dependecy!
If you want to know the size and list of dependencies of scim that emerge downloads, use this command..
#emerge -pv scim
Install it using this command :
#emerge scim
Swanalekha needs another two packages named scim-tables and scim-m17n,they wont get installed with scim, so install them manually using this command..
#emerge scim-tables scim-m17n
Now get the source tarball from http://savannah.inetbridge.net/smc/Swanalekha/swanalekha_0.3.1_2.tar.gz
untar it and cd into it..
$tar -xvf swanalekha_0.3.1_2.tar.gz
$cd swanalekha_0.3.1_2
now run make as root
#make
now configure scim and run
$scim-setup
scim-setup window
In the Global Setup tab under IMengine enable Malayalam.Restart scim for the changes to take effect.Now open your favourite text editor.Right click and select Scim Input Method from Input Methods.Then left click in the scim tray icon,select Malalyalam-Swanalekha from it and start typing malayalam!
PS: Hope you have malayalam fonts installed,otherwise get some fonts from here and copy it to ~/.fonts or /usr/share/fonts and restart x
