Problem with TeX installation

I am using a Linux Mint Maya system on which I had been using TeX for some
time. I re-installed Texlive from CTAN because my Malayalam documents
compiled using xelatex were not formatted properly. Their right margin was
not properly justified and the quotes did not appear properly as when we do
in latex. They just showed the straight dashes as we see in ascii text
instead of the beautiful quote marks we see in documents compiled in LaTeX.
Also, dashes written as "--" appeared just like that. I thought all this
may be because my TeX installation was not proper.

I had read somewhere that tex installed using apt may not always be good
and that direct installation from CTAN is the best. But now I don't seem to
get proper fonts  in both English documents compiled using pdflatex and
Malayalam omega. Since the TeX installation from CTAN goes into
/usr/local/texlive/2012, that is the path that I gave while installing
omega Malayalam too. Afterwards, when trying to compile a Malayalam
document, it complained that fonts were not found. Wonder whether there is
something wrong in my installation! When I tried to compile an English
document using pdflatex, it complained that palatino font was not found. On
earlier occasions after installing TeX in a fresh system, I never had to
install fonts like Palatino. But now it looks like the font has to be
installed separately. Or, perhaps, the solution might be to remove the
present installation and reinstall TeX using apt.

Any help in this matter would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance and warm regards,
Sasi

-- 
V. Sasi Kumar
Free Software Foundation of India
Please see: http://swatantryam.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
Home:        http://www.tug.org.in/
TeX FAQ:     http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
unsubscribe: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tugindia