distro project comming soon... Till then...

[Munzir <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

We are working seriously in this project. Collaborating through sms
messagegs and meeting in IRC whenever possible. Expect to see something
in the coming days but till then let me enlighten you about
Mandrake-specific issues. What is included here is really a mess. Please
don't flame me for being not orgnaized. Time is about to hang me to
death. Feel free to organize it and open different thread for each.

Mandrake 9.2RC1 is released, I took the responsibility of downloading it
and testing it against any Arabic bugs so my Mandrake Arabization
Project (MAP) page will be updated. I found many issues and reported it
to bugzilla, the cooker-i18n list, and personally to Mr. Pablo. Pablo is
very cooperative.

I am going to list some of these here and need you to vote, so by the
time Manrake 9.2 is out I hope I would only have in My Bug Reports few
creatures ;)

Please, take some minutes out of your precious time to vote for these
bugs and see how you can help.

Upon the installation one will be faced with the dialog box of "Please
choose a language to use.". Choosing Arabic as the Primary language
should enable Arabic during the installation. In Mandrake 9.1 (bamboo)
Arabic fonts are not usable to DrakX and hence it's disabled completely
in drakxtools in 9.2 (ken). This should be solved instead.
[http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5181||Bug 5181]
--
Just now I received from Mr. Pablo:
It seems it won't be possible to have arabic display at install time
(there are size problems with the ramdisk method used, and the arabic
fonts are a bit too huge, and it is too late in the 9.2 path to change
completly the install method).

However, while the install will be done in English, Arabic language will
be recognized, and after reboot the system should be properly localized.

For version after 9.2 the install method will be rethought to overcome
that problem (that also affect several other languages)

Pablo
>> I'm still in search of a freely distributable font covering all the
>> arabic letters (or at least those used by Arabic and Farsi, as 
>> translations for those); or someone able to do the needed changes
>> with pfaedit to one of the GPL'ed fonts available.
> 
me> I don't know but a free Arabic font is already there in the distro.

Pablo:
Yes, but for Arabic only. It doesn't have the supplementary glyphs
needed for other languages like Farsi and Urdu (for Farsi particularly
it is a big penalty; as it has a very good translation level, but no
suitable font...).

The Arabic fonts are under GPL, so anyone with font knowledge could
add the missing glyphs (most of them are easy as they are just
variations in number of points over/under base letters, only 3-4 letters
need specific drawing); but I can't do it myself, as I don't know enough
about scalable
font editing. 

> If there is something wrong
> with the fonts encoding please explain and we will do our best to
> correct it if possible.

well if more glyphs could be added it would be perfect.
In the www.unicode.org there are good tables showing the presentation
forms of the various chars.

Particularly interesting and easy (no new form, just dots, strokes or
a small tah (which glyph is already present) are:
U0679, U067E, U0686, U0688, U0691, U0698, U06A9, U06AF, U06C7
digits U06F0-U06F9 (only 4,5,6 differ from standard arabic ones)
those need a bit more design: U06BA, U06CC, U06D2, U06D5
with those 23 extra characters it would cover also Farsi and Urdu.

------------
rm -i (or just rm since rm -i is an alias for rm by default in Mandrake)
will not work due to certain environmental variables related to Arabic.
If /etc/sysconfig/i18n contains LC_ALL=ar_SA.UTF-8, LC_ALL=ar,
LC_MESSAGES=ar, ... or we export these variables manually, the rm -i
command and other commands will be disabled!!

[munzir at localhost munzir]$ export LC_ALL=ar_SA.UTF-8
[munzir at localhost munzir]$ touch arabeyes
[munzir at localhost munzir]$ ls -l arabeyes
-rw-r--r-- 1 munzir munzir 0 May 6 13:48 arabeyes
[munzir at localhost munzir]$ \rm -i arabeyes
rm: remove regular empty file `arabeyes'? y
[munzir at localhost munzir]$ ls -l arabeyes
-rw-r--r-- 1 munzir munzir 0 May 6 13:48 arabeyes
[munzir at localhost munzir]$ \rm arabeyes
[munzir at localhost munzir]$ ls -l arabeyes
ls: arabeyes: No such file or directory

[http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5185||Bug 5185]

Note: It's fixed now in Mandrake. Please check whether it's valid in
other distro. It's a funny bug ;)

----------------
The HTML code in the file /doc/install/ar/install.htm on the Mandrake
CD1 is corrupted. Contact Amr Fathy <amr10 (at) menanet.net> or correct
it ourselves.

Arabic alignment in all of the dialog boxes is left justified. This
should be right justified.
[http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5184||Bug 5184]


> *What do we need to have a cvs repository? I think this model is much

Send the crypted password block and I'll request an account for you
(you also agree to be coordinator for Arabic and take care of
files and translations from other people? How is word "Coordinator:"
in Arabic (for the status page), and which email should I list?))

> *If I choose the Arabic keyboard during the installation, the
BACKSPACE
> key doesn't work. Is it intended like this? I am not sure what is the
> layout of the Arabic keyboard. Where can I find such information?

During install old xmodmap system is used; I will look at the
xmodmap.ar file what is the problem.
... I don't see absolutely nothing wrong!
I attach you the xmodmap file, you can load it with xmodmap command
(eg: xmodmap filename).
I load it and the backspace key works fine for me...

after install, the arabic layout is from
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/pc/ar
but it doesn't define backspace key at all... 
 
> >>When one chooses Saudi Arabia as one's country, one will be face
with city options that include: Riyadh, Riyadh87, Riyadh88 and Riyadh89.
What are these?! I don't know from where these names come from. After
checking some related websites Riyadh87,88,89 has the very same timezone
which is 7 mins and 4 secs different from Riyadh. I am still confused.

You finally make me look at the glibc sources :)
Riyadh is defined in "glibc-2.2.3/timezone/asia" file as this:

# Saudi Arabia
# Zone  NAME            GMTOFF  RULES   FORMAT  [UNTIL]
Zone    Asia/Riyadh     3:06:52 -       LMT     1950
                        3:00    -       AST

That is, until 1950 it used a quite special offset of 3h 06min 52sec.
After 1950 it uses 3:00.

The other names come from glibc-2.2.3/timezone/solar8[789]
they define a very special "timelight saving" mode, progressibe, with
each day having a different offset (insted of having 6months +3h and
6months +2h, there is something like +3h0min5sec on 1st January,
+3h,1min2sec on 2nd January and so on... each of the solar87, 88, 89
defines each and every one of the 365 days of the year with a unique
rule for each day. the trigonometric and astronomic formulas for the
calculations were given as comments.

So, the timezone for those three years was different each and every one
of the days of the year!
Did Saudi Arabia actually used such a special time count those three
years?! (I have hard to believe that all saudi people had to change
their clocks each day in so subtle way)

Anyway, it is for past years, should probably be removed to avoid
confusions.
--
I think we have an astronomer in arabeyes lists. Rabah?