Fedora team has been closely working with Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) team to get most of the SMC patches upstream and setting up Malayalam has been relatively easy on Fedora. Since most of the patches have gone to upstream fedora you don't have download any rpm other than Swanalekha (Malayalam transliterator) on your own to be able to read and write Malayalam on a Fedora 9 machine. Follow the basic instructions to set up Malayalam on Fedora 9.

Open a terminal and become root by running
su -
Copy the following code into a file and save the file as ~/install.sh. Now in the terminal source the file by running source ~/install.sh.

#remove lohit-malayalam
yum remove lohit-malayalam
#This will install scim-tables and related dependencies
yum install scim-lang-malayalam
#The update are not yet into the main repo so you have to 
#enable the testing repo to get the im-chooser. The im-chooser
#installed by default crashes that is why we have to get the
#updated version
su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update im-chooser'
#Install all smc fonts
yum install smc-fonts*
cd ~
wget http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/smc/fedora/8/RPMS/swanalekha-ml-1-1.fc8.i386.rpm
rpm -i swanalekha-ml-1-1.fc8.i386.rpm

Now you launch im-chooser by going to System->Preferences->Personal->Input Method, and select 'enable input method'. You are all set to user your Fedora 9 system for both reading and writing in Malayalam