Mohammed Sameer of Cairo, is just 24 and a pharmacy graduate. But he's one of the thirteen or so active young people who are working hard to open new vistas to the world of computing, specially in Asia. Called the Arabeyes, this team is working to make computing more relevant to hundreds of millions using the Arabic lettering across the globe.

In a world where computers were created for a left-to-right flowing script like English, the languages of Asia (and less so of Africa, since many use the Roman alphabet) pose significant problems when getting them to work with the vital tools of tomorrow, computers. Arabic gets written from right to left. Indic scripts, such as Hindi, can get written on top, below and in-front of a base alphabet. Added to that, various computer terms have to be translated, in a way the user understands.

But these challenges are being met.

Located online at arabeyes.org, the network Sameer is part of describes itself as a "meta project that is aimed at fully supporting the Arabic language in the Unix/Linux environment". It is designed to be a central location to standardize the Arabization process. What makes it interesting is that Arabeyes relies on voluntary contributions by computer professionals and enthusiasts scattered across the globe.

If successful -- and it's arguably already on that road -- the project could benefit a large pool in West Asia. "I suppose (it would potentially benefit) all people using Arabic or Arabic-lettered languages, in the Middle East and the Urdu-speaking people (of South Asia). Then, there are people speaking languages like Pashto too(using a similar script)," says he. "This could be a pool of maybe 225 to 400 million people (depending on how you define it)," Sameer told this correspondent in an interview. Arabic has been a literary literary language for over 1500 years, and is the Islam of liturgical language

When did this project start? Where did it start? Who are its members?As of now, where has Arabeyes reached? Sameer had an interesting story to tell, while visiting India recently.

What makes it different is that unlike other 'Arabized' products, this one looks at Free Software, sticks to a 'free' approach for computing, and works on the ideals of 'open source' communities. GNU/Linux, the computer operating system around which Arabeyes is based, is among the most famous examples of free software and open source development.

In the past, most attempts to Arabizing Unix -- a multi-task and multi-user computer operating system, that came before GNU/Linux -- were mostly attempted by Arab computer science students studying outside the Arab world. Once their studies ended, their projects got abandoned.

This time round, there's no problem of sparse code or fighting to re-invent the wheel. So, rather than creating new computer applications, their goal is to incorporate modifications and additions to existing "common everyday-use applications". This becomes possible in the world of Free Software, which offers the freedom to run, study, redistribute and improve its crucial software code.

Sameer says it has currently "100% Arabised" Gnome, and has touched about 99% in terms of KDE Arabisation. (Gnome and KDE are the two most popular desktop environments used in the world of Free Software. In graphical computing, a desktop environment offers a graphical user interface, or GUI, solution to operate a computer. It provides icons, toolbars, applications, applets, and abilities like drag-and-drop. This gives each desktop environment a distinctive 'look-and-feel'.) .

OpenOffice.org 1 has also been completely translated, and they are now working on OpenOffice.org 2. OpenOffice.org is an office applications suite for computers, that is compatible and also direct competitor to Microsoft Office. Unlike the latter, it is free software. FireFox, the revolutionary web browser which today millions are seeing as an option to the dominant Internet Explorer, is in the process of being translated.

That's regarding translation.

Like other Free Software projects that thrive on the Internet, this one too has its contributors coming in from different countries and regions. Youcef Rabah is an Algerian PhD student in Cosmology. Mohammed Elzubeir is from the Sudan. Ossama Khayat is from the Lebanon and studied in Kuwait. Nadim Shaikli is of Iraqi origins. There are 13 volunteers listed on the http://www.arabeyes.org/people.php page of the project, ranked in terms of the "CVS commits" (or, roughly, software improvements) they've made. We're reminded that "chances are if someone has a high number of commits, they are working very hard." Mohammed Sameer is ranked a decent third.

Team-leader Nadim Shaikli is one of the core team, and with the aid of another member, introduced Arabic to Vim -- the multi-platform text editor from the Free Software world. Currently they're re-working on 'Akka' project (which basically a software layer on top of the console, or almost old-fashioned non-graphical monitor which is however still used by many,specially on older computers).

"We are trying to create an Arabic spellchecker, called? Duali. But it's still not complete," says Sameer. Duali, named after the legendary founder of the Arabic grammar (Abul Aswad al Du'ali - d. 688), is an Arabic spell-checker that is designed to accommodate to the Arabic language. It is also extendible to other non-Arab based languages as well. Other tools being "Arabised" are also listed on their website.

What does he see as the major tasks sill to be completed?

"We had (taken up work on) a live CD to show Arabic work don't understand.," Sameer says. Incidentally, a Live CD is one which boots from your CD-Rom drive, and runs software from there itself, without needing to be installed on your hard disk. Sameer adds: "The original maintainer (or volunteer team leader) isn't able to carry on. I took maintainership, but have yet to complete (something significant). I have to finalise various projects and we need to complete whatever we're doing. Then, we should try to be more involved with testing various products for Arabic support," says he.

Basically they see themselves as try to fix what's missing.

"I don't think we have much things technically missing. But what I see as really annoying is that we're missing some important standards. For example, we don't have a standard on how to normalise various Arabic letters -- the diacritics. These are some small things, but they're eally annoying," he says with the frankness of a techie eager to do a good job, as against the attitude of a salesman proffering a flawless product.

How did he find the Arabeyes team? Simply while trying to locate solutions to his own computing needs. One of the projects of the Arabeyes team is Akka, a tool for Arabizing Linux and Unix consoles. Akka allows you to read and write in Arabic in your plain-text 'console' (as the old-fashioned monitor was called), using any existing software without any change.

Solutions like Akka and QaMoose were just what he was looking out for. QaMoose allows you to access an English/Arabic user-defined dictionary via the web.

Their team has over 500 registered users, but approx 13 are very active contributors, on a daily basis. Users are those who appreciate their work, which depends on the active contributors to really grow and become meaningful.

Could such a small group even dream of making a difference to the way a few hundred million people use their computers? "Two people, (Free Software Foundation guru) Richard M Stallman and (the father of the Linux kernel) Linus Torvalds did change the life of millions (in terms of computing). They were two; we are 13. If they can do this, I hope we too can achieve something," says he, with cautious optimism.

Asked why the Arab would could simply not take the easy option of using proprietorial software -- which is made by companies like Microsoft, and is widely used across the globe, but is a costly solution in the poorer parts of the planet -- Sameer laughs: "That's a religious question," says he. His reference, of course, is to the fact that campaigners for Free Software have strong preferences and points of view, and refer to their choices for Free Software and the freedom it offers as being "religious options".

"We're really focussing on open source software." Free or Open Source is any computer software distributed under a license which allows users to change or share the software freely. By contrast, proprietary software means that some individual or company holds the exclusive copyrights on a piece of software, at the same time denying other people the access to the software's source code and the right to copy, modify and study the software.

SOUTH ASIA AND URDU: Sameer says he had been contacted by people from South Asia too, who wanted a solution for the Urdu language that is also written right-to-left. Unfortunately, he says, they lost contact.

Urdu is a language which originated in India, emerging out of interaction between Indian languages and the tongues spoken in the courts of the rulers of the sub-continent -- from the time of the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire and its succeeding states. The language of the court, and of literature, was usually Persian, while that of religion was Arabic, the language of the Quran. This process of the mingling of these languages and the local dialects led to the development of everyday speech that sounded much like today's Urdu and Hindi. There is still a spectrum of dialects spoken in the streets of cities from Lahore and Karachi to Delhi and Calcutta and in the villages all over the region.

Like Arabic, it also uses a right-to-left script, making it face common challenges when attempting to computerise across various software programmes.

Says he: "At Arabeyes, we would like to know the state of Urdu. I think Farsi (from Iran) would also benefit from this work, the Farsi people have been very helpful for the last few years."

What's his tip for those wanting to work in the field of localisation, or adapting computers to local languages? "They should really understand the language needs, and then, they will start hunting around for what's missing and what's not. And then, I don't know.... but I'd really be glad to help anyone," he adds.

Sameer has been using computers "since I was in primary school" when his Attari-manufactured computer was used for the programming language Basic, that became widespread on home microcomputers in the 1980s. "My father helped me. He knew this was the thing I loved. I just graduated and worked for (a formal degree in) pharmacy. I don't know anything about that field (pharmacy, which I studied) now."

Sameer is one of the admins responsible for the Egyptian Linux user group website. Linux, being a computer operating system that depends largely on volunteers, has a concept of volunteer-run 'user groups' that spread awareness about it worldwide.Egypt has two major Linux user groups or LUGs -- called the Eglug and Linux-Egypt.

Sameer can be emailed at msameer at foolab.org or msameer at eglug.org

• Arabeye's priorities

• Address the various font/keyboard-mapping issues (for typing in Arabic)
• Create the ability to write plain-text Arabic easily
• Create the ability to spell-check your Arabic text documents
• Create the ability to send and receive mail through an Arabic interface
• Localize (or translate) Common Graphical-User-Interface (GUI)
• Create the ability to take Arabic text files and create various enriched

NOTE: Frederick Noronha is a Goa-India based freelance journalist and can be contacted at fred at bytesforall.org