The console is the land where GUI is non-existent. Fortunately, we can have Arabic under the Linux console with the use of some utilities.
http://old.arabeyes.org/project.php?proj=bicon
BiCon is a console program that supports bidirectional text display, for languages like Arabic, Persian and Hebrew.
To install BiCon, you have to have GNU FriBidi installed. Note that for some distributions, notably Fedora, you need to install the packages fribidi and fribidi-devel.
After satisfying the dependencies, download the latest bicon from the project page (currently 0.2.0), uncompress, then install
$ ./configure $ make # make install |
Now simply run "bicon" to get a console supporting Arabic or Persian. The language used is chosen according to the LANG environment variable.
While using bicon you can switch between Arabic and English using the Alt-Shift key combination.
Updated instructions for installation are always included in the bicon tarball, in the README file. Similarly, updated usage instructions are in the man page subsequently installed.