Upon the installation one will be faced with the dialog box of ”Please choose a language to use.”. Choosing Arabic as the Primary language should enable Arabic during the installation. In Mandrake 9.1 (bamboo) Arabic fonts are not usable to DrakX and hence it's disabled completely in drakxtools in 9.2 (FiveStar). This should be solved instead. Bug 5181. Related bug: @RedHat

If one chooses Arabic as a primary language the “Use Unicode by default” option is automatically checked which is correct since Arabic is only available in linux locales as a utf-8 encoding, but if Arabic is chosen as the Secondary language, This option won't be checked which causes many problems. One of which, cat'ing any utf8 Arabic file in konsole (kdebase-konsole-3.2-70mdk) won't display as Arabic characters. The strange thing is that if the file is encoded in iso9985-6 encoding it will display properly which means konsole displays iso9985-6 files but not utf8 files. http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9596