When ever I recommend Ubuntu as an alternate desktop to my students and colleagues, they say that it is not possible to read Malayalam news papers on internet with it. Most of the (silly) Malayalam news papers use Indic scripts with proprietary encoding. They will render only if you install the fonts properly. This post explains how to do it in Ubuntu/Debian. Alternately, you can install Padma , a firefox add on, and read all the papers with out any hassle.
Padma is a system for transforming Indic text between various public and proprietary formats. At present, it supports Unicode and RTS (Rice transliteration scheme) as output formats. RTS is available for telugu only. Padama supports these input methods. RTS ,Unicode, ISCII ITRANS TSCII, TAB and TAM. It also supports most of the dynamic fonts used by popular Indian Language news papers.
You can read the following papers with ease if you have padma installed on your Firefox.