I recently upgraded to linux mint 17, cinnamon. However, the console does not display the fonts properly. I tried both ttf-malayalam fonts and smc-fonts. (But as far as I remember, the package was smc-fonts-malayalam in ubuntu 13.04. Its just 'smc-fonts' now?)
Firefox and gedit displays the fonts correctly though. When I copy paste malayalam from the browser (or gedit) to terminal, it does not render properly. I tried some transliteration with varnam - not rendering properly. However, I can copy varnam output to gedit and view it properly.