After very hard and deep work by Steve Langasek (using preliminary work from Shlomi Loubaton), the Debian Installer team is proud to announce that right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi (Persian) and several others (usually called "BiDi support") are now supported by the first stage installation process of Debian.
This work needed to include patches to libraries used for user input during the installation phase, in text mode. The very latest netinst images built by the Debian Installer team, with BiDi support, are available at: http://gluck.debian.org/cdimage/testing/sid_d-i/i386/current/sarge-i386-netinst.iso (other arches also include BiDi support, replace "i386" by your architecture name in the above link) Screenshots: http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/d-i/screenshots/ Debian is thus now, as far as we know, the very first Linux distribution to support RTL languages from the beginning of its installation process. A lot of work remains to be done, for instance keeping RTL and BiDi working when the distribution is installed, or right-aligning dialog boxes, but a giant step has been achieved. We also need to properly support BiDi/RTL with debconf in the installation 2nd stage and at the console, after rebooting. The not_working/2nd_stage-arabic.png screenshot at the above URL shows that this currently is not the case (it is left-to-right displayed). This work is part of the general globalization process of Debian and specifically our installation software, which now includes translation in 40 languages, covering about 68% of the world population. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
