Zekr FAQ

Zekr is an open platform for working and research on the Holy Quran. For more details its current state and road map see Zekr 1.0 plan here. Please also see the glossary of common Quranic terms used here and in software.

Zekr is a name for the Holy Quran (in Quran terms). Linguistically, it means "note", "reminder" or "message". More clearly, Quran is a reminder for the human morality.
(12-104), (38-87), (81-27) "إِنْ هُوَ إِلاَّ ذِكْرٌ لِّلْعَالَمِينَ" meaning: It is no less than a message for all creatures (A. Yusufali).
(68-52) "وَمَا هُوَ إِلَّا ذِكْرٌ لِّلْعَالَمِينَ" meaning: But it is nothing less than a Message to all the worlds (A. Yusufali).

The main homepage for Zekr is http://zekr.org. It's also hosted on SourceForge.net, where you can find the latest releases as well as an archive of previous releases. You can also fill bug reports of feature requests there, or access to the source code from CVS.

Pleas see the participation page here.

Zekr is originally written and being developed by Mohsen Saboorian (weblog). These peoples also helped with language packs and useful feedbacks:

• Ari R. Fikri (Indonesian language pack)
• Younes Moumen (Basic French and Arabic language packs)
• Riyad Preukschas (German language pack)
• Michael Kalinin (Russian language pack + Russian translations)
• Omar sm (Critical typo reports)
• Aydin Tarık Zengin (Turkish language pack + Turkish translation)
• H N Jafar (Malay language pack)
• Erik van Luxzenburg (Initial Dutch language pack)
• Muhammad Bashir Al-Noimi (Arabic language pack)
• Dangiislam.org (Kurdish language pack)
• Mohsin Shafeeque Hijazee (Urdu language pack)
• Nedim Hadžić (Bosnian language pack)
• Alma Aganović (Help on Bosnian language pack + Korkut translation)
• Johan Laenen (Dutch language pack)
• Zabeehkhan (Pashto language pack)
• Fareed A. Bashirov (Tatar language pack + Tatar translation)
• Mohammad Mehdi Saboorian (useful feedbacks)
• Ali Rastegar (Mac port + Mac maintainer)
• Mohammad Derakhshani (Ubuntu package maintainer)
• Hamid Zarrabi-Zadeh (Quran text automatic verification)

There is not a really nice and standard platform for Quran related topics. There are some software which are fully commercial, others are free-commercial but still with no source code. I really couldn't find an easy-to-use, free and popular Quranic platform. If you know one, please let me know :)

For now, GNU GPL. You can find more information about licenses on release notes page.

You can contact me here.

The reason to this may be that you didn't customized your JRE installation to support non-European languages. In Windows platforms, if your computer locale is not Arabic, when installing JRE, you should check all components (including non-European fonts and encoding support) to be installed.

Some notes from JDK 5.0 Documentation (Supported Encodings):
Sun's J2SE Development Kit 5.0 for all platforms (Solaris^TM operating environment, Linux, and Microsoft Windows) and the J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 for Solaris and Linux support all encodings...
Sun's J2SE Runtime Environment 5.0 for Windows may be installed as a complete international version or as a European languages version. The JRE installer by default installs a European languages version if it recognizes that the host operating system only supports European languages. If the installer recognizes that any other language is needed, or if the user requests support for non-European languages in a customized installation, a complete international version is installed... The international version (which includes the lib/charsets.jar file) supports all encodings...

So, you can either reinstall you JRE (customized, this time), or install a JDK.

There may be some problems with Zekr startup or something similar. If you cannot start Zekr, please make sure that the problem is not about your configuration. Please remove ~/.zekr folder (or [Documents and Settings\username\].zekr on Windows) and start the zekr again. If this doesn't fix the problem, send me the log file ~/.zekr/zekr.log.

Versions prior to 0.5.0 beta 1, might not work on Java 6.0. However this could be fixed if you copy Zekr somewhere without any space characters in the path.

See this page for a list of latest updated language packs. Currently we have Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Indonesian, Kurdish, Malay, Russian, Turkish, Persian, Pashto and Urdu language packs. Please help us adding your own language pack to Zekr.

Zekr is written in Java (JDK 1.4+ compliant). It is developed in Eclipse platform (3.0 Mx to 3.3.1).

Zekr is fully developed on SWT. It currenly supports bidirectional rendering, only on Windows and Linux. The BIDI support for Mac is limited to single widgets only, and composites and groups are not supported.

Latest Zekr source code may always be available on SourceForge.net CVS. Use this URL for web based CVS tree and this one for checkout instructions.

Simply because I know Java more than C++!
In adition it is cross platform, easy and open. I used SWT because it is a nice looking native widget toolkit and has a number of advantages over Swing (More fast, more cool, more easy use).

By now, it can be run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. I did only test it on 32-bit architectures. From Zekr 0.6.0 beta 1, we may always have a 64-bit distribution for Linux.

Yes! Zekr ported to Linux from version 0.2.0. You should first download and install a Mozilla GTK2 (1.4+) browser from mozilla.org. You can download Mozilla 1.7.3 GTK2 from Mozilla.org.

Please see this Wiki page for more info about installation instructions.

Please remember where the Mozilla in installed (e.g. /usr/local/mozilla), and check if there is a components folder inside the mozilla home directory. You should set an environment variable MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME to the mozilla home directory. If there is no components folder inside mozilla home, check [mozilla home]/lib, and if there was such a folder, set the environment variable to this location.
On my Open Source SuSE 10.0, mozilla is installed on /opt/mozilla, but the main folder is /opt/mozilla/lib where components folder can be found.

After all, you can run [zekr]/linux-run.sh to launch the Zekr platform.

Make sure that you have carefully done these steps:

1. Set an environment variable "MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME", which refers to your Mozilla GTK2 1.4+ installation (Firefox can also be used if your distribution brings it with linkable Gecko libraries. Redhat distributions for example does that).
2. java should be set in your path. Please make sure that the JRE you are using is not GCJ/GIJ. GCJ/GIJ (GNU's native Java) is not a standard Java, hence not Java 1.4+ compaliant.

Yes, Zekr also works fine on Mac. Special thanks to Ali Rastegar for his porting and maintainance of the Mac version.
It looks quite like Linux GTK. The only difference is that there would be no bit of bother to set any environmet variable. Safari is used as default browser. For running Zekr on Mac, you should unzip Zekr package and run mac-run.sh.

From Zekr 0.4.0 the download package is a Mac Application Bundle (which brings more ease of use for Mac users). Many thanks to Ali Rastegar for his helps.

Find the answer on Wiki.

• Windows: Zekr is tested on Win 2000 and XP and Vista. Windows package has a simple installer. After installation, you can find Zekr on your programs section in "Start Menu".
• Linux: For Debian-friendly editions, you can use our .deb installer package, but make sure first to uninstall any previously Zekr installation on your system (Ubuntu example): sudo dpkg --purge zekr. You can then install Zekr with the following command line (Ubuntu example): sudo dpkg -i zekr_[VERSION_DETAIL]_i386.deb.
  There is also an apt repository available for Debian. Use instructions on this page to add it to your update site list. If you are using other distributions such as Fedora or SuSE, simply use .tar.gz distribution, but set your Mozilla installation manually in linux-run.sh.
• Mac: TBD
• Other platforms: which platform you exactly mean?

See the full download archive at SourceForge.net.