Unicode fonts are the best for publishing Malayalam (my native language) content on the web. But many of the popular regional sites such as Malayala Manorama and Deepika still use custom fonts which works on ISO encoding.

In Windows, these fonts are automatically supported. When it comes to Ubuntu, what you see is a jumbled set of characters. Following set of instructions will help you reading Deepika in firefox. Follow a similar procedure for other sites.

1. Install the custom font. For Deekipa, Malayalam font can be downloaded from http://www.deepika.com/font.htm. Download this to a folder and then using terminal go to the folder. Now copy the font to /usr/share/fonts,

sudo cp mlkr0ntt_TTF.ttf /usr/share/fonts

2. Refresh the Ubuntu font cache. For that run the following command,

sudo fc-cache -fv

3. Close all firefox sessions and reopen firefox. Go to www.deepika.com. Now from the firefox menu select the following,

View => Character Encoding => Western (ISO-8859-1)

Now you should be able to see some Malayalam characters!

These days flash player is a must have plugin for browsers. Without it you cannot a lot of video sharing sites such as YouTube. By default Ubuntu doesn’t come with flash player since the Adobe flash player is proprietary. So I did,

jayson@jayson-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Everything went smooth till the last step where I got,

Download done.
md5sum mismatch install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz
The Flash plugin is NOT installed.

It turns out that Ubuntu does a MD5 checksum check on the packages it install. Unfortunately Adobe changed the flash player installer sometime in December. So what to do?

The solution is to manually install flash player. Ensure that you close all the browser windows before doing this.

# get the flash player tar
wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

# extract the tar file
tar xvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

# run the installer
cd install_flash_player_9_linux
./flashplayer-installer

# specify the firefox folder during installation
/usr/lib/firefox

Thatz it. Now you can watch flash videos on Ubuntu!
This also shows why it may be better for your grandma to stick with Windows!

I recently uninstalled Windows from all my machines and installed Ubuntu on them. There are two reasons for this,

1. I don’t want to buy a new Windows license whenever I buy a new machine. I already have spent over Rs. 10K on Windows licenses and is not ready to pay again!

2. Ubuntu supports all my hardware out of the box! Even WiFi cards(NetGear) and WiFi adaptors (Dlink DWL-G122)  are supported when you boot Ubuntu.

It has been a smooth transition. One of the things that I enjoy a lot is the Pidgin IM client. Now I can login to all my IM accounts at once. Hence I got in touch with old friends on some of my old IM accounts!

Here is quick re-cap of what I did,

• Booted using the latest ubuntu release - 7.10.
• Deleted all existing partitions on my 80GB disk.
• Created a root partition of 6.5GB and a swap partition of 1GB. I kept these partitions below 8GB since on M2N-MX motherboard, grub is having problems booting from a partition over 8GB!
• Installed the following software using apt-get - Java 1.6, Aptana IDE, unrar, Lyx, Ruby1.8.6 and Rails2.

In this article I will show you how you can convert your Windows XP machine to run linux distributions such as Debian without risking your partition table! You would be wondering what I mean by “risking your partition table!”. Well, last week I had installed Ubuntu on my Windows PC and it had replaced Windows boot loader with Grub. After a while I decided to remove Ubuntu. I opened up the disk administration tool in Windows and re-partitioned the disk to free up the space used by Ubuntu. Then I realized that my Windows system won’t boot anymore! I had use the “Windows recovery disk” and then issue a “fixmbr” to fix my system.

This week I decided to try out Debian and this time I decided to install it on a virtual PC running on top of Windows. This has many advantages. First, there is no risk of corrupting your partition table. Secondly, you can easily add or remove more distributions. Thirdly, your WiFi may not be recognized by Debian net-install, but NAT translation by VMware ensures that WiFi is accessible as ethernet! Another advantage is that you can easily switch to Windows if you want to watch TV on your “Windows only” TV tuner card!

There two leading virtual pc softwares in the market. Microsoft virtual pc and VMware server. Both these are free! I prefer VMware since almost any OS works on it.

Download Debian

You can download Debian ISOs which range from 30MB to 12GB! I decided to download 30MB network install ISO, which is a very minimal ISO.  If you use this, the components required for a base system will be downloaded during installation through an ethernet network available for your virtual machine. Also ensure that you download an ISO suitable for your hardware. For me it was an amd64 version(64 bit AMD processor).

Installing VMware

You can download latest version of VMware server from here (about 150MB).  You would also need to register to get your free serial key.  VMware asks for this key at the last step of configuring a new OS!

When you startup VMware, first you get “connect to host screen”. Select “localhost” since you are not trying out remote hosts.

From the File->New Click on “Virtual Machine”. This is used to configure a new virtual machine to run a different operating system.

1. Select “custom” for virtual machine configuration.

2. Select “Other linux 2.6.x kernel 64-bit” as the guest operating system. If you are not using a 64-bit system,use “Other linux 2.6.x kernel”.

3. Now select the file and directory for the new OS. Ensure that you select a disk which has enough space for the new OS.

4. For access rights, you can decide to make it private (accessible only for your userid) and accept defaults for the startup/shutdown options. You will need to change it if your account doesn’t have administrator privileges.

5. Allocate 50% of your total RAM for the new OS. I have 2GB total RAM and allocated 1GB for Debian.

6. Use NAT for networking and create a new virtual disk and accept defaults (SCSI). Allocate enough space of the virtual disk. I have 8GB for Debian.

Now you need to configure the downloaded Debian ISO as a CD Drive so that Debian installer will start when you boot up your new virtual PC. For this edit the new virtual PC and change the CD configuration as shown below,

Now start your new virtual PC from VMware. Now you should see the following Debian boot console.

Follow the prompts and complete the Debian installation. Debian will download the required components by connecting to internet. If you don’t want this, you can use the complete Debian ISOs (instead of the 30MB business card version).

After installation, the first package I installed was the command line internet browser “lynx” by issuing the command,

apt-get install lynx
 

I have dabbled in linux long time back but never took it seriously. But this week something triggered inside me and I have decided to give it another try. My cousin sunil is a linux guru and with his blessings I have restarted my linux love!

But hey, I have no intention to chuck Windows out. After all I have paid over Rs.6000 for it! So instead I decided to use Vmware (which is a virtual pc server and is now free!) as my new machine and install Debian on it.  Check out the Debian social contract to see why I am interested in Debian.

Earlier when you run linux on Vmware it used to be slow. But not anymore! With my machine (amd64 with 2GB RAM) speed difference is hardly noticeable!  Another advantage is that with NAT networking on Vmware, your Wifi network will appear as an ethernet network for the virtual pc!  (Configuring WiFi on Debian business card ISO seems to be almost impossible).

So I downloaded business card version of Debian (33MB) and I am currently running the net-install from it.

Checkout this interesting timeline of linux evolution. You can see that debian based distributions are getting pretty strong!