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

[Alex de L. <ale...@xs...>]

Thank you for contacting us, it's always good to know what's happening with
Morphix-based distributions, and knowing what problems people face in respect
to

> First of all, Morphix's 
> hardware auto-detection is not in par with Knoppix. 

This is true. Even though I have done my best to keep the hardwaredetection in
place, it's very much trial-and-error to figure out what is going wrong on
certain systems, and what differences between Morphix and Knoppix are causing
this. 

> 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? 

I normally attempt to merge Knoppix's hardwaredetection with Morphix's at every
release. However, I'm not a Klaus Knopper, the amount of feedback is limited
and
often not detailed enough to take action on. If Morphix fails on your laptop, I
wonder why you havn't contacted me (repeatedly, until it works, bug me as much
as possible), or tried to figure out what is going wrong yourself. I
can only improve Morphix using feedback and help/patches, so if your problem
isn't already listed in the buglist you ought to do this and possibly
investigate the matter if it already is. Please remember that between all the
different aspects of Morphix I have very little time to make it run on every
piece of hardware. This is the reason why Morphix is still far from a
1.0-release and why I'm not able to fix every bug on every release. It's an
evolutionary process. I can only do this with people supporting and activly
helping me. If not, progress will be slow.

> 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? 

Nope, not yet (I started this project to make a dutch distribution, and I
havn't
even gotten around to building a NL-module :)
However, it would be relativly easy to force the locale using a script in
/cdrom/exec (see the readme on the 0.4-1 release), an example:

#!/bin/sh
COUNTRY="nl"
LANG="nl_NL@euro"
export LANG COUNTRY
echo "LANG=\"$LANG\""                  > /etc/sysconfig/i18n
echo "COUNTRY=\"$COUNTRY\""           >> /etc/sysconfig/i18n

Having this executed after the hardwareconfiguration fase would force X to
start
using the dutch locale. The same would be possible for other languages already
present in KDE or Gnome. You could add the KDE Farsi locale to the mainmodule
directly using the howto's, or experiment building a minimodule using
minimod-gen.pl.

> 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?

We already have one, and it suits Morphix just fine :)
I am busy on an accompanying partitioner, both done in GTK2 and thus should
support utf-8. The current installer has it's own quirks, but it works most of
the time. The partitioner should have been done months ago, but with only 2
people on and off it, development is slow yet again.

> 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. 

Well, I hope it will become one too :) 
Take a good look at Anmar's project Arabbix, like he commented earlier. My
Arabic is pretty bad but it does look very nice. The most important thing you
could help me with is feedback, bugfixing and development support. There are
many improvements possible, but one can never have too much feedback or people
sorting out bugs. Above all, stay in touch: some problems have lingered on for
weeks/months only because I don't know if things have been fixed or not...

Cheers,

Alex


                 /'-'\
                ( o o )
------------oOO0--(_)--0OOo------------
Wouter Alexander de Landgraaf          
Student AI & CS VU Amsterdam 
Phone: 06-16844084
GPG: http://am.xs4all.nl/key_alex.asc
WWW: www.alextreme.org & www.morphix.org
             .oooO       
             (   )   Oooo. 
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