By now we are sure most of you have heard that Prof V K Samaranayake has passed away and are very much saddened by his death. He has been very supportive and instrumental to us in promoting GNU/Linux and Free & Open Source Software. He is an irreplaceable loss and will be missed dearly.
Sinhala packages for Ubuntu 7.04 (feisty) and installation instructions
are available on sinhala.sourceforge.net.
What is available?
- LKLUG Unicode Sinhala font
- libicu (renderer used by Open Office) with partial Sinhala support
- SCIM transliterated input method
- Automatically set the required environment variables in
/etc/environment
How to install
-
Add to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://sinhala.sourceforge.net/ubuntu/i386/edgy/ ./
- Update repository metadata:
apt-get update
- Install Sinhala packages:
apt-get install sinhala-gnu-linux
- Upgrade libicu package:
apt-get upgrade
- Logout and login again. Environment variables need to be
set/updated (NO NEED TO REBOOT)
How to test
- Visit http://si.wikipedia.org/ and see if the Sinhala letters render correctly.
- Copy and paste some of the content from Sinhala wikipedia to Open Office Writer. Then highlight the Sinhala text and choose the LKLUG font to display them.
- To test SCIM, press Control-space whilst you are running a Gnome application. Then select one of the Sinhala input methods.
NOTE:
Repositories are only provided for the most recent version of Ubuntu because we need to encourage users to test the most recent version. If you have any problems, questions or suggestions, please send an email to the appropriate mailing list.
What is available?
- Updated LKLUG Unicode Sinhala font
- libicu (renderer used by Open Office) with partial Sinhala support
- SCIM transliterated input method
- Enable Pango in firefox
How to install
- Add to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://sinhala.sourceforge.net/debian/i386/dapper/ ./ - Update repository metadata:
apt-get update - Install Sinhala packages:
apt-get install sinhala-gnu-linux - Upgrade libicu package:
apt-get upgrade - Logout and login again because environment variables need to be set/updated (NO NEED TO REBOOT)
How to test
- Visit http://si.wikipedia.org/ and see if the Sinhala letters render correctly.
- Copy and paste some of the content from Sinhala wikipedia to Open Office Writer. Then highlight the Sinhala text and choose the LKLUG font to display them.
- To test SCIM, press Control-space whilst you are running a Gnome application.
The 'sinhala' CVS module on the LKLUG webserver, containing patches and source code for adding Sinhala support to GNU/Linux, has officially been moved to Sourceforge. You can access the Sourceforge Sinhala project's CVS at:
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=91319
NOTE: Eventually, the 'sinhala' CVS module on the LKLUG webserver will not be publicly accessible.
Please use the 'sinhala' CVS module on Sourceforge from now on. You can find the Sourceforge Sinhala project page at:
The two GNU/Linux distros I'm paying the most attention to are Fedora Core and Ubuntu. Interestingly, these two distros decided to address enabling Pango in Firefox in completely different ways.
Fedora Core 5
Since Fedora Core 4, Pango is ENABLED in Firefox by default. In order to DISABLE Pango in Firefox, an environment variable has to be set:
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
You can see the difference by running Firefox at the command line like so:
# MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 firefox
/usr/bin/firefox contains an explanation:
------------------------------------------------------------------- ## ## In order to better support certain scripts (such as Indic and some CJK ## scripts), Fedora builds its Firefox, with permission from the Mozilla ## Corporation, with the Pango system as its text renderer. This change ## is known to break rendering of MathML, and may negatively impact ## performance on some pages. To disable the use of Pango, set ## MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 in your environment before launching Firefox. ## # # MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1 # export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO # -------------------------------------------------------------------
Ubuntu 6.06
On the other hand Ubuntu 6.06, decided to DISABLE Pango in Firefox by default except for a pre-determined list of locales.
The extensive discussion can be found here:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/32561
/usr/bin/mozilla-firefox contains the code:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
if [ "x${MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO}" = x ]; then
if egrep '^(bn|gu|hi|kn|ml|mr|ne|pa|ta|te)_' \
/var/lib/locales/supported.d/*[^~] >/dev/null 2>&1; then
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0
else
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
fi
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO
fi
if [ "x${MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO}" = x0 ]; then
unset MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO
fi
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This means that Ubuntu 6.06 users that need to ENABLE Pango in Firefox need to set an environment variable:
MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0
You can see the difference by running Firefox at the command line like so:
# MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=0 mozilla-firefox
Red Hat is going to ship the LKLUG Sinhala true type font in the next version of their distributions.
The LKLUG Sinhala true type font can be downloaded from:
My partial Sinhala support patch to ICU 3.4 (used by Open Office 2):
has been added by Red Hat to recently released ICU RPM libraries. They can be downloaded from:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/development/i386/Fedora/RPMS/
From the Redhat mail archive:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-beta-list/2006-May/msg00064.html
icu-3.4-8
---------
* Wed May 03 2006 Caolan McNamara - 3.4-8
- add Harshula's icu-3.4-sinhala1.patch for some Sinhala support
We are finally updating the sinhala.linux.lk website. Drupal is being deployed to manage the content.
So far I have found it quite intuitive, needed to first understand the menu and navigation system and then the content type.
UPDATE: The content from sinhala.linux.lk has been moved to lug.lk. Drupal was finally deployed on {linux,lug}.lk in March 2008
