Hello again everybody, after some struggle I finally succeeded installing Koha, configuring it and working with English records using MARC21. All under both Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04. Now my problem is that my records will be 99% in Arabic. Thanks to the help of many of you I found this valuable past message that outlines the steps for installing Chinese charsets. But this did not solve my problem 'cause:

For this: * install ICU (unicode library from IBM) * activate it by editing default.idx file, and : comment this line: #charmap word-phrase-utf.chr add this line: icuchain icu.xml

Your icu.xml should look like this: <icu_chain locale="fr-FR"> <transliterate rule="\'>\ "/> <transliterate rule="[:Number:] { '-'> '' "/> <transform rule="[:Control:] Any-Remove"/> <tokenize rule="l"/> <transform rule="[[:WhiteSpace:][:Punctuation:]] Remove"/> <transform rule="NFD"/> <transform rule="[:Nonspacing Mark:] Remove"/> <transform rule="NFC"/> <display/> <casemap rule="l"/> </icu_chain>

1) Install ICU. What debian package provides ICU? Is it this? i libicu42 4.2.1-3ubuntu0.10.10.1 International Components for Unicode ii yaz-icu 4.2.25-1indexdata ICU utility for the Z39.50 toolkit or am I missing something, maybe? 2) defatult.idx: is the one under /etc/koha/zebradb/etc? 3) I'm unsure about the meaning AND location of the icu.xml file. Should it be placed under /etc/koha/zebradb/etc as well? What should contain in the case of Arabic? I suppose that the tranform rules will not be the same as French... does anybody have a template for Arabic? 4) after all these aspects will be fixed, how do I make myself sure that everything works fine? Best! Stefano