Almost all GTK and Gnome applications on Linux use Pango for rendering. Therefore, if you get Myanmar Unicode support into Pango then you can render Myanmar correctly in a lot of Linux applications and the Gnome Desktop. You can use either or both Graphite and M17N pango modules to achieve this, though Graphite's Myanmar support is more maintained. A Pango Myanmar OpenType module is also being developed.

The Myanmar NLP lab has translated some of the common GTK and Gnome applications into Myanmar using Unicode.

Graphite Pango Module

Building the Pango module yourself for Graphite is a bit difficult. You need to get the latest source from Subversion. You can also download a zip file using the svn-view interface. e.g. graphite-2.1.tar.gz. Make sure you read the instructions in wrappers/pangographite/README.

The following build commands should work on most Linux versions. You will need all the relevant developer libraries installed first. The instructions assume you are using the tagged version graphite-2.1, you may prefer to build the latest version from trunk instead.

tar -zxvf graphite-2.1.tar.gz
cd graphite-2.1
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-tracing
make 
sudo make install
cd wrappers/pangographite
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

You may need to create a ~/.pangorc file to enable pango to see graphite. It should contain something like:

[Pango]
ModuleFiles=/etc/pango/pango.modules
ModulesPath=/usr/lib/pango/1.5.0/modules:/usr/lib/pango/1.5.0/modules/graphite

Make sure that you have a graphite enabled font installed like Padauk and see if you can display text correctly in gedit.

M17N Pango Module

The M17N Pango Module is available at m17n.org, but it is uncertain whether the Myanmar support is still being developed.