Re: [Morphix-devel] Morphix based distro in Farsi language

[Anmar O. <an...@ca...>]

Hello Aryan:

My name is Anmar Oueja. I am the team lead on an Arabic Live CD project 
titled Arabbix. You can find it at http://www.arabeyes.org.

Arabbix is based on Morphix for many reasonsa and one of them is the 
modularity of Morphix not to mention the great community and support.


Aryan Ameri wrote:
> 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.

That is great news. Good for you it is quite the task. Arabeyes team 
translated the GNOME environment.. makes you wish our languages were 
closer :).

  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. 

Several Arabeyes member and I are big Debian fans. Ufortunately the 
Woody Debian installer is not curses based there fore it is not possible 
for Farsi or Arabic to be used.

This is about to change in the Sarge installer (next gen Debian 
Installer). I have been working with one of the Debian installer 
developers and he promised me bidi support on the curses (well actually 
it is NEWT) installer for Debian. I did translate some .po files for him 
to test.

If you are interested, please email me and  I will send you all the details.

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?
> 

ooh.. a new installer.. will be happy to hear about that too :)

> 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

I wish you the best of luck. I am sure it will work out. Please do not 
hesitate to contact me or anybody at www.arabeyes.org since our goals 
are common and the success of one of us is the success of the other.

Thanks.

Anmar