Latest Linux developments in the Arab world

I got this from NewsForge which I think is brilliant. We need more coverage of Linux Arabisation projects and information… the more the better!

Latest developments in the Middle East

In the Middle East, GNU/Linux is reported to have caught on with major universities in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and other countries. Also in business, oil and gas companies in the Gulf, some banks, and other companies are adopting it, according to reports by Zeid Nasser. IBM recently finished Arabizing the major components required to run GNU/Linux on the client side and is also working on Arabic support for Motif and X-term, OpenOffice Writer, and Mozilla.

Among GNU/Linux fans there have also been Arabization efforts. A grass-roots development group called Arabeyes has been developing Arabic support for KDE. Arabeyes is a meta project aimed at fully supporting the Arabic language in the Unix/Linux environment. It is designed to be a central location to standardize the Arabization process, and relies on voluntary contributions by computer professionals and enthusiasts all over the world.

Recently, Arabeyes announced the release of Katoob, a small text editor for *NIX operating systems, based on the GTK+ library 2.0.