October 9, 2005
Use عربي/arabic on your Debian system
From the first day i started using GNU/Linux as my main machine at home or at work, beeing able to browse arabic websites was a complete failure. The default fonts that Debian installs by default with X11 or even the packages I tried to install such as:
were no good.
I’m no fonts expert but what made it work is when i apt-get’ed the following packages:
apt-get install ttf-arabeyes ttf-kacst xfonts-intl-arabic msttcorefonts
msttcorefonts - “Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts” made it work (i guess), give it a try, restart X11 and you should be able to browse in arabic.
Now, in order to write in arabic in most of the application you use, insert in your ~/.bashrc:
setxkbmap -symbols "us(pc105)+ar+group(ctrl_shift_toggle)"
group(ctrl_shift_toggle) enables you to switch from Latin to Arabic by using the combination “Ctrl+Shift”.
enjoy!
Filed by haytham at 6:39 pm under Linux HOWTOs / Tutorials