Minbar, prayer time for Linux

Keeping up with the Ramadhan theme, I decided to install Minbar on my Gutsy installation. Minbar is a gnome application for muslim prayer time notification. It was included with the Ubuntu Muslim Edition along with a bunch of other application such as zekr, etc.

The newest version of minbar is already available on ubuntu repositories (mine is Gutsy), so all you have to do to install it is by using apt-get

sudo apt-get install minbar

To manually install, download the ubuntu/debian package here. You can doubleclick the deb file to start automatic installation.. ok that’s not manual install hehe…

After Minbar is installed, test it by typing minbar on a terminal

surfer@M5Mobile:~$ minbar

Next is to add Minbar to your session, so it will be automatically started each time you boot your pc. To do this, go to System > Preferences > Sessions, then click add to make a new entry. The command for Minbar is “minbar”

Click “OK”, and then “Close”.

The next step is to setup the localized prayer time. Click on the “Preferences” button, and go to “City Details” tab. If you have the information, put the latitude and longitude of your city, otherwise, click on the “Find City” button. You can find “Jakarta” “under Australasia & Oceania”. Do not forget to set the time zone, for me it’s 7.0 (for GMT +7). If your city is not listed on Minbar, you can always use the Prayer Finder tool on islamicfinder.org to get the the latitude and longitude of your city.

Next, go to the Advanced tab to setup the calculation method. My pick is Muslim World League (MWL). You can compare the prayer time calculated by Minbar to other source such as eramuslim(Indonesia/Jakarta) and islamicfinder. There might be 1 to 2 minutes difference between each source. Click the “OK” button to return to the main window.

Lastly, click “Close” to minimize Minbar to tray.