The details for setting up tamil in KDE and using KBabel for translation.

1. Installing tamil tscii fonts

Follow the howto by Anbumani at

2. Installing tamilxkb (This works with tscii and tab fonts).

Download the keyboard program from Dinesh's website at

a. save it to a place (/usr/local/src).

b. cd /usr/local

c. tar xvzf src/tamilxkb-0.0.9.tar.gz

d. cd tamilxkb-0.0.9

e. (edit the tamilxkb file and change the third line from

./tamilxkbo

to

/usr/local/tamilxkb-0.0.9/tamilxkb

(this is to make it convenient to put a short cut in your panel)

f. Go to K-->Preferences --> Look&Feel ---> Key bindings

and select all the combinations where F12 key is used and

click on No Key (tamilxkb uses F12 to toggle between english

and tamil, if we do not disable other bindings, tamilxkb will not

run)

g. Right click on the panel and Panel Menu --> Add --> Legacy application

In the dialog box which comes up navigate to /usr/local/tamilxkb-0.0.9 and

select tamilxkb and click ok.

Now you will have an icon for tamilxkb on your panel. Click on the icon you

should get the tamilxkb program running.

3. Using KBabel

KBabel is included in kdesdk package. If it is installed in your system you

can find KBabel in K --> Development.

when you start up KBabel for the first time, it will ask you for the language

settings. Provided you have set up tamil fonts properly as in step 1 above,

you will not have any difficulties, start working with the po files in the

translation package.

4. Installing tamil kde package and using the tamil desktop everyday will

help you to get a feel for the translation and give a real motivation to do

the tedious translation work :-)

Download

Login as root and change to the directory where you downloaded the above and type

rpm -i kde-i18n-Tamil ................

if there is no message and you get the prompt back the package is installed.

Then you can follow the howto by Venkat at

While setting the fonts pay attention to the size of the font (in my case

size 13 works well with tscakaram font), and set the encoding to tscii-0.

When you relogin, you can see most of the desktop in tamil, the rest is

pending to be translated and you are welcome to participate.

This is an excerpt from email in erumbugal-linux posted by Siva.