It's most definitely not as easy as just installing a font file. I don't use Mandrake and never have, but you could install the "BST Hebrew" TrueType font available from
http://www.biblestudytools.com/ (it's under resources somewhere) -- that should allow you to type using openoffice in a hebrew font, but it's not the best solution, nor am I sure if it will work entirely well with vocalized texts, etc. I'm assuming mandrake has some automagic font installer if you want to go that route.
An easier option is to if you're using a graphical login ike GDM or KDM you can switch easily between languages if you've got the support installed. KDE has a nice language pack for arabic which works well for me, but I prefer not to use KDE. They should have one for hebrew (but that won't let you /type/ hebrew text).
As for browsing in Hebrew, there's a language packs for Mozilla available at
http://www.mozilla.org/ which is as easy as clicking a button. Mozilla 1.3.1 is the latest version of Mozilla that has the Hebrew language pack. The direct URL for localization projects in mozilla is:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_status.html
I'm a arabic linguist and I prefer to use ArabTeX which is a package for LaTeX which also supports Hebrew (despite it's name). LaTeX is a text-based type setting language which is extremely powerful. The output looks pretty damn good too.
This is an example what a LaTeX file using ArabTeX would look like:
\documentstyle[12pt,arabtex,atrans,nashbf]{article}
\vocalize
\begin{document}
\setnashbf \Large
\begin{arabtext}
.talaba waladuN min 'abIhi 'an ya^stariya lahu
\end{arabtext}
\end{document}
The output is in the form of a postscript file (which is easily printable from linux, it's similar to a PDF file but superior. In Mandrake you should be able to read it with: ggv or ghostview):
http://judecca.aculei.net/~blcknight/arabtext.ps
TeTex (a LaTeX distribution) and ArabTeX are available from
http://www.ctan.org/ but the install isn't trivial just from a tarball.
Perhaps someone with more experience with Mandrake can give you a better distribution-specific answer. It's definitely worth a shot trying some of my suggestions out, but multilingual support in Linux for alphabets other than latin is indeed lacking. It's possible to do and it does do it very well when it's configured properly, it just usually does not work out of the box.
- Stephen Benjamin
blcknight@judecca.aculei.net
