[INDOLOGY] Linux in a virtual box on Mac (was: Fwd: New Sanskrit-Eng. dictionary...)

[Robert Zydenbos]

I have been using Linux within Parallels on my Macs for the past few 
years, mainly because of the Mac's ease of use, esp. where peripherals 
are concerned.

The one drawback I found with Mac is the still limited support (the Snow 
Leopard system: I hate the Lion function that opens programs and files 
on booting up) for Indian scripts in OpenType fonts (esp. the southern, 
Dravidian scripts), which an Indologist of course would like to have -- 
so what I have been doing is preparing texts on the Mac with NeoOffice / 
OpenOffice, with the not-really-so-nice results, and then making the 
final PDFs in LibreOffice in Scientific Linux with Parallels, which look 
really nice.

My experience with the various Linuxes is that Scientific Linux and 
CentOS support Indian scripts well (also with iBus as input engine). 
Both are available free of cost and are based on the Red Hat Enterprise 
Edition, which is not free of cost. The last time I tried (about a year 
ago), Ubuntu, SUSE and others had text input problems and simply 
couldn't produce clear and good results, whether on screen or on paper.

So these are my tips for those among us who want to use Linux with South 
Indian scripts. But I would be happy to be corrected if in the meantime 
the other Linux versions (or newer Mac versions) have improved.

Regards,
Robert

Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> For several years I've run GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) as my main OS, with WinXP
> in VirtualBox in an Ubuntu desktop window, when I need
> it.<http://wujastyk.net/pgp.html>  It's solid and I don't notice any
> system speed degradation on my old T500 laptops (Centrino2) or my
> desktop (don't know).   It's an excellent solution.
>
> Best,
> Dominik

-- 
Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Institute of Indology and Tibetology
Department of Asian Studies
University of Munich
Germany
Tel. (+49-89-) 2180-5782
Fax (+49-89-) 2180-5827
Web http://zydenbos.userweb.mwn.de/