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Re: The Red Hat Project?



The story so far:
Red Hat Linux is a much used Linux that does not have Arabic support.
Various people are interested to make this happen, as mentioned in
http://www.linux-egypt.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1617
and the feed back in this thread.
A project is set up in sourceforge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/redhat-arabic/ , led by Mohamed
Eldesoky, for the purpose.
It is even mention (in the thread above) that there is support for this
from within Red Hat itself. So sthings are encouraging.

The technical aspects:
The next Red Hat Linux version is 10, codenamed severn). Its beta is
already out, and it's due October. The packages used should have
relatively good support of Arabic (I didn't test yet). Examples are:
* KDE version 3.1.2 ( kde-i18n-Arabic-3.1.2-4.noarch.rpm included).
* GNOME 2.2.0
* vi 6.2.18 (should support Arabic IIRC)
* fonts-arabic-1.3-1.noarch.rpm
So good Arabic support can be expected, with a little push.
What is needed in my opinion (well, Mohammed Sameer's opinion somewhat
altered;) is:
1. Arabic support for the Linux console
2. Good Arabic fonts
3. The ability to read and write Arabic in KDE and GNOME (may be other
window managers later).

This can be be done by (in my opinion):
1. Packaging akka satisfactorily enough for Red Hat to include in their
distro. (they have Canna for Japanese, so the concept isn't new).
2. Beta testing for severn and strongly requesting including full Arabic
support already available in KDE and Gnome, reporting any bugs.
3. Ditto (the same) for vi and may be other packages (tetex?)
4. Checking that the Red Hat package redhat-configure-language works
well with Arabic (it didn't till rh9), and may be helping in making it
do so.
5. Checking anaconda (the red hat installer) for good configuration of
Arabic at startup.
6. Encourage the redhat project to upgrade openoffice to 1.1 (which I
think they would do if they got a 1.1 version not beta,RC).

I would like to have as much suggestions on these as possible on the
following couple of days, and I would like to encourage as much people
as possible to beat test severn (including myself)..

Oh, and by the way, what I would do is:
- join the redhat-arabic project at source forge (hope it's working,
they have 0% activity now) and may be encourage some coordination with
arabeyes
- for the current days pursue akka working and packaging
- have a weekly update for this mailing list on the situation so far, if
you encouraged me to do so
- beta test severn

Note that we have a window of 1.5 months or so for all actions regarding
severn, but I think it should be enough for most things if we have
enough beta testers

Please, feedback
k
-- 
Muhammad Abdulmuneim Alkarouri
Teaching Assistant
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Faculty of Engineering and Architecture
University of Khartoum
Khartoum, Sudan

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