Finally Arabic Gnom 2.16 has been fully translated to Arabic, thanks to a dedicated team of translators.

See statistics!

We will be emphasising more on quality and correctness for gnome 2.18, since most of the job is already done. Some details are available in this Wiki page.

Minbar, the Gnome Prayer Application is finally done. This first release does the Athan call (prayer call) and notifies before the time of the prayer. It uses ITL for prayer calculation, which has a high level of accuracy. It is initially available in Arabic, English and French.

Download the source tarball from here. You need a few libraries to build it, the enclosed README lists them. If you have any problems, I will be happy to know about them. There is a debian .deb to be released soon for debian derived distributions. If you can package this for your own distribution that would be great!

This screenshot shows it with its tray icon (the Kaaba shaped icon). Click for a larger version.

Many thanks to Abderrahim Kitouni and Mohammed Adnène Trojette for the great help!

The technical dictionary aims to translate and standardise technical terms that are used in software. It is an effort to unify the terms used across all projects, to present the user with consistant and understandable interfaces.

We have been, since some time, trying to discuss the terms using the mailing list. This created many problems: discussions are forgotten, people discuss terms over and over and there is no single point of reference for all terms.

To solve these, we have recently imported the dictionary to the wiki. You are welcome to contribute, whether you are a native english or bilingual speaker. Proficiency is not need, normal users are also welcome since the work is being done for them, you can comment on whether the term is understandable to you.
The dictionary is available here (Currently only words starting with A are there):

http://wiki.arabeyes.org/Technical_Dictionary

Leave a comment on the discussion page if you would like guidance on where to contribute.

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NOTE: It has come to my attention that many people are being redirect here from Google for Minbar. The latest about Minbar is available in this entry: Minbar.

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Gnome is sorely missing Islamic/Arabic applications. There has been some attempts in the distant past, like a gnome applet called “akemsalatak” (cool name). Unfortunaly it won’t build, and I have not been able to establish contact with its maintainer.So here is a new Gnome Prayer Application. It is still very much a work in progress, I welcome any suggestions or contributions. The code resides in Arabeyes CVS here.

One of the cool libraries it uses it libglade. Libglade makes GUI’s so easy to make it’s almost a sin. The application uses gstreamer for Athan playback, and libitl (the Arabeyes islamic tools) to calculate the times.

Pre-Beta screenshot:

UPDATE: Minbar 0.1 has been released, please bookmark this link for the latest details: Minbar