How to Type Arabic on Linux without Arabic Keyboard

Yamli is all the rage these days. It's an Arabic search engine and "smart" keyboard that lets you type in Arabic letters in way of their similarly sounding English letters. So, if you want to type " الاردن اولا," you would type "alordn aola" in English and Yamli's text box will generate the Arabic text for you. However, Yamli only works within the browser. (last time I checked). So, to be able to do the same system wide, I figured I will just modify the system's Arabic keymap to type the letter I want when pressing the English letter. This way, I can press M and get م, N-->ن, and the number 3 and get ع, the number 7 and get ح. and this works system wide. You can use it with open office text editor, renaming files, naming songs, i.e. everywhere. This is how I did it:

in terminal (Applications-->Accessories-->Terminal) type
gksudo nautilus
this will grant you access to modify system files. So, be careful!
a window will open and ask you for a password.
it's the same password you created when you set up ubuntu
after you successfully enter a password:
the root file browser opens showing the desktop
click on "file System" in the left side panel and navigate to usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ara
this will open, in a text editor, the Arabic keyboard layout/keymap that is pre-installed.
delete all text, copy the keymap from this page, and paste it in. Save, reboot, enjoy!

the layout I am using is based on this, windows only, Arabic keyboard. of course, you can add, delete, move, replace all you want!

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AmmanTT زي ما رحتي إجيتي

ammantt.com

Just by watching the live stream and following and interacting with those on twitter, this month's, and the first, Amman Tech Tuesday event was a huge success on all fronts. From attendance to interactivity and from the level of participants to the quality of success stories, the event proved to be the nucleus of a great future for Jordan's techies and the industry in general.

A major absentee from the whole campaign preceding the event and the event itself was Jordan's official representation and a government backing. Aside from the venue (I am assuming PSUT is a public university), the government was nowhere to be seen. Nevertheless, that MIA status was a crucial ingredient for those who truly understand and care about technology to be themselves and avoid formality, bureaucracy and ass-kissing!

Had the government had a major role in organizing and carrying out AmmanTT, we would have seen a tech-ignorant, attention-[deprived], status-loving government official parade the gov [failed] initiatives, tediously put attendees to sleep, and slyly sidestep pressing questions and constantly inserting الحكومة الرشيدة و القيادة الحكيمة everywhere linguistically possible!

Believe it or not, that would have definitely been the outcome of AmmanTT had the Government organized the event. The Gov's track record speaks volumes of their shortcomings and the constant case of إجت تكحلها، عمتها!

I am not sure who said it, may be a royalty, when asked of the reasons behind the success of Jordanians relative to the Arab World in the field of entrepreneurship and technology, the answer was that "we stayed out of the way."

That should always be the government's position and just have those with real technology and tech entrepreneurship experience handle the تنسيب of new laws and regulations and relay the community's concerns.

this post was brought to you with the support of

AmmanTT: زي ما رُحتي إجيتي

a government campaign to eradicate those ديجيتال people and prevent any possible change

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