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!

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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

poc stands for PO check. PO (for Portable Object) is a file standard used to compile translations.

The script checks these files individually one by one using msgfmt, and commits them (using cvs) with the commit message being the statistics output by msgfmt, it was wrote for the Arabeyes translation team.

Get poc.