How to get arkavattu properly in Ubuntu?

Getting kannada to display in your computer is very easy with Ubuntu. Latest version of ubuntu (11.04 in my case) supports kannada out of the box.

But for kannada input you need to add a few packages. The input method I prefer is Ibus. Install Ibus and related packages to get kannada input method working. This post is not about how to get kannada input. It is about a small tweak I did today to get '೯' (arkavattu) alongside of 'ha'.

Generally we type :
ಕ+ರ್+ಮ = to get = ಕರ್ಮ
Similarly
ಅ+ರ್+ಹ = gives = ಅಱ instead of ಅರ್ಹ

I didn't dig deep to find the key combination to get '೯' properly. Tweaked a little in the .mim file to get ಅರ್ಹ properly.

This is the fix:

open kn-itrans.mim file which has itrans keyboard layout (which I happen to use).

Navigate to the following directory:

$cd /usr/share/m17n

Open the kn-itrans.mim file in a text editor (like gedit) with root privilege:

$sudo gedit kn-itrans.mim

On entering sudo password the file opens. Move down till line 84 and comment out the line by entering ';'(semicolon) at the begining of the line. Save and close.

Restart ibus. And get 'ಅರ್ಹತೆ' for sake of typing it! It solved the issue for now, but I will update about the clean fix as soon as I get to know.

With two new machines and a fresh blogger!

It is nice to see the refreshing new look of blogger. I had thought that google had forgotten that it has a stone age blogging platform. In front of the features rich wordpress blogger used to seem dull. One had to stand on his head to know about the page visits or traffic statistics. Now it seems like the days of staying inside the closet is over for blogger. The UI is clutter free and has soothing design, could adapt to mobile and tablet and other small screens effortlessly.

Have an update from my side. My laptop was on artificial respiratory system for a few days and eventually went to coma. I purchased a new desktop yesterday. It is an assembled machine having the following configuration:

Processor: core I5
Ram: 8 GB
Graphics card: NVidia 1 GB
Hard Disk: 1 TB
Monitor: LG 23" LCD with LED backlight

For sake of mobility I purchased a sleek and trivially light weight Samsung N100 netbook. It has intel Atom processor. 2GB RAM and 250 GB Hard disk.

Since the desktop is an assembled one, I didn't opt for operating system installation at the assembly point. It is a huge rip off to pay handsome amount to get just an instance of the pirated windows OS. I installed Ubuntu 10.10 LTS edition on it but strangely the LAN stopped working. So temporarily windows is dwelling inside the hard disk.

The Samsung netbook had Meego Os pre-installed. I hastily formatted the hard disk and installed debian over it. Netbook refused to co-operate. Attempts to skim through the web references on a compact screen of my mobile and executing the commands led me no where. A visit to the samsung's official website enlightened me that they have system drivers only for windows 7 and xp. Thought of reverting to Meego but there was no recovery option and generous people at Samsung didn't bother gentle Meego OS to be burnt in to a disk! All resulted in approaching Blue screen God, windows 7.

I will be trying out a number of installations on these two machines in the coming days. So watch out for a series of logs in this respect.