[Morphix-devel] Morphix based distro in Farsi language

[Aryan A. <a....@li...>]

Dear Morphix Developers:

My name is Aryan Ameri, and I am contacting you on behalf of the LIGLUG 
group (Linux Iran GNU/Linux User Group). We are a bunch of GNU/Linux 
and Debian lovers in Iran, who are working on on a couple of Farsi 
related Linux projects. We have translated the KDE desktop to Farsi 
<http://www.farsikde.org> and it's the first and only Farsi computer 
environemnt. We have also setup linuxiran.org <http://
www.linuxiran.org> which provides an open forum for the iranian linux 
community. We have translated the FSF site, <http://www.fsf.ir> and we 
are in the process of making Iran's first GNU/Linux distro called 
Shabidx <http://www.shabdix.org> which is currenly at version 0.8

In making Shabdix, we are encountering some problems. We believe in 
Debian, and we want Shabdix to be a Debian based distro. Unfortunately  
the current Debian installer (in woody) is ncurses based, and we can't 
translate it, because it doesn't support BiDi (Right to Left) Unicode 
UTF-8, which is a neccesity for writing Farsi. The installer for the 
next generation of Debian Sarge is also currently text based and it is 
not known wether a graphical front end to it will find it's way into 
sarge or not. Currently Shabdix is based on Knoppix, but this approach 
also has it's own problems. Knoppix's installer is not that great, also 
Knoppix is not modular. We have to apply all our changes to Knoppix 
every time that a new version of Knoppix is released. Not a great 
soloution, and one which we are not really satisfied with.

The natural answer to all these of course seems to be Morphix, with it's 
modular design and as you call it 'morphability'. We have been 
following your project with great interest for several months. Our 
group decided to contact you,  so that there can be more cooperation 
between our groups and to see if we can find the soloution to a number 
of concenrs that we have regarding Morphix. First of all, Morphix's 
hardware auto-detection is not in par with Knoppix. One of our 
developers contacted your a couple of months ago, and you told him that 
this  is fixed in CVS, but we keep trying morphix, and it's latest 
release still fails on my laptop. Are there any plans to syncronize 
Morphix's hardware detection with Knoppix, any time soon? 

Also, are there any tools to make a i18n module? We are perfectly happy 
for Shabdix to become a i18n Farsi module of Morphix. Is such a thing 
possible? 

About the installer, I have heard that you are developing a barnd new 
installer for Morphix. Is that true? If so, when do you expect it to be 
usable, and be part of Morphix? Is the installer graphical? Does it 
support utf-8?

I welcome all your suggestions and advice. And please inform us if there 
are any ways that we can contribute to Morphix. We feel that Shabdix's 
future depends on Morphix, and would like Shabdix to be a true rock 
solid, jaw-dropping distro. 

Cheers
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Aryan Ameri