Willing to help with RPM Packaging

[Abu Bakar Al-Idrus <arabeyes at hooha dot com dot my>]

Assalam `alaykum and hello to all


My name is Abu Bakar. I am an Arab born and raised in Malaysia. I am pretty new to Arabeyes and I am only just beginning to experiment a little bit with some of the software available here. I may not be able to contribute very much in terms of translation (since my Arabic is terrible), but I may be able to help a little bit where bug-hunting and testing is concerned. However, my main interest is in packaging some of the applications from the Arabeyes project in RPM format. At the moment, I am using Red Hat Linux 9 with Ximian Desktop 2 installed.


Since more than one person has already asked me "How did you hear about Arabeyes?" over IRC, let me briefly write about that here. My first introduction to Arabic software on Unix/Linux was when I learnt the TeX typesetting language which allowed me to move on to ArabTeX (which I still use now), but I soon found that using English to input Arabic was very prone to errors. So I started the hunt for Arabic support on Linux ... that was about 2 years ago or more. I sometimes visited linux4arab.com but had trouble reading it since mozilla didnt support Arabic web pages at the time. Quite recently I browsed the site again and found a link to Arabeyes and that was when I became interested.


I need to mention also that I'm quite busy at times with work and family responsibilities, but I am willing to lend a hand to help make RPM packages available for the less adept Linux users who might not want to go through the compilation process. I believe if we open the way for less experienced users to use the software, we should be able to get more feedback about things breaking, usability etc. At the moment I am quite familliar with making RPMs for the Red Hat distro, but I'm sure with a little tweaking, we should be able to extend the packages to be used on other RPM based distros.


Perhaps someone in here could point me in the right direction and give me some suggestions about what needs to be done. 


Meanwhile, you can take a look at the RPM packages I have made of libquran and gnomequran at the following links:


http://alidrus.mlcc.com.my/RPMS (binary RPMs)


http://alidrus.mlcc.com.my/SRPM (source RPMs)



Regards

Abu Bakar Al-Idrus