The certification procedure explained in this section aims to encourage distros to include the latest bug-free applications that support Arabic and to enourage them to apply proper default configurations to enable Arabic. On the other hand, the responsibility of advancing application compliance falls on the application developers.
Certification can take place only for a finished distribution. Beta and unstable distros cannot be certified, as their status can change very frequently.
The exclusion of a specific application due to a legal problem (e.g. being not GPL compatible) does not prevent a distro from getting a certain level of certification
There are three levels of Arabic support in distributions. They are the Silver Level, the Gold level and the Platinum level. The
A distro is said to be supporting Arabic at the Platinum level, or fully supporting Arabic, if it supports all major variations of applications in the must-have, critical and important level and, in addition, having an installer and distro-specific applications supporting Arabic.
A distro is said to be supporting Arabic at the Gold level if the distribution includes at least one program that satisfies each functionality at the Must Have or Critical level in such a way that the program in question is packaged with the default distribution and its default configuration is working with no tweaking, possibly with specific installation-time decisions made.
A distro is said to be supporting Arabic at the Silver level if the distribution is augmented with a single how-to that enhances it so a user can use the how-to to elevate the distro to a gold-equivalent one. The how-to can include:
The public place in the internet from where to download packages packaged for the distro to satisfy the must-have and critical dependencies.
Any configuration steps needed to make the above applications or ones included within the distro working.