It seems that FriBidi maintainer isn’t going to release next version of FriBidi (aka fribidi2) which implement Arabic shaping, though the files are in it’s CVS tree. So I made an ubuntu package for it if any one is interested in it’s shaping support.

The sources a .deb file are here, I built this on Ubuntu 6.10 (aka Edgy Efft).

WARNING use these packages on your own risk. Fribidi2 is an unreleased, untested BETA software. Also I’m not sure if the packages were made the correct way or not.