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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