Persian in Console, using Bicon and console-setup

This is a screen-shot of Persian translation of The Little Prince, in GNOME Terminal, using Bicon.

A few days ago Ahmed El-Mahmoudy told me about his recent work on Bicon, the Bidirectional Console program. He has made a Debian package, so I made one for Ubuntu Hardy, with a little fix on builddeps, through Launchpad's Private Package Archive build system. You can find the package at my PPA.

I just started using PPA and this is my first package there. By the way, I've also became a Launchpad Beta Tester and am using Launchpad as my OpenID server.

Also I found console-setup works fine with XKB's Iranian keyboard layout, with a change on CODESET. This is how you can get a Persian/Iranian keyboard on your Linux console. Open /etc/default/console-setup and change the lines like these:

CODESET="Arabic"

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,ir"
XKBVARIANT=","
XKBOPTIONS="grp:shift_caps_toggle,lv3:ralt_switch,grp_led:scroll"

Bicon project is not so active, but if you need Persian support in console, it's a good start. Please report bugs, or inform us at #arabeyes at irc.freenode.net. Thanks.