It seems that everyone and their cat are building Livecds and calling them distros these days.
the Arabic FOSS community is not standing still while this revolution is going no sir, while still a mostly small and unactive community we managed to produce a large amount of trivial-mods-to-mainstream-distro distros, just-a-change-of-theme-livecd distros, vaporware-ultrea-islamic-distro distros and what have you.
lets see we have
- haidar linux (the oh won't someone download me distro)
- Khawarezmy OS (s/r/l/ distro)
- Resala Linux (official mentioned in UNDP distro)
- Linux Plus Core 1 (first distro in maadi)
- Arabicos (the name speaks for itself)
- Arabbix (show case of the 3.5 working arabyeyes projects distro)
- Phaeronix (the lets fail medical school distro)
- ATOS Linux (*CENSORED*)
I'm sure I missed 20 or so distros, but this is not about them, this is about me
so I thought hey I've been in here for longer than most of these people and yet I don't have my own 7alal to the bones, essential for cultural/political/economical independance, improve our international image, jihad distro
so as a true pioneer of FOSS and an valiant fighter for freedom and independance I give you BIN DRAKE
this state of the art distro was hacked together in a couple of days (yes only a couple of days but thats because I'm THE GREAT ALAA, the only arabic distro maker to grow his hair instead of his beard).
the fact that it is just a normal mandrake install that was converted to a livecd by running the mklivecd script does not mean it is a trivial effort, far from it first of all I found two bugs in the mklivecd script, reported and fixed them (these where BASH scripts, we're talking serious programming here, and the bugs involved wrong symlinks to boot), then I had to use arabic locale (just try to sit through a Mandrake installation in arabic without running away screaming), then I had to compile 2.5 arabeyes projects (pyduali, bicon and itltools), install rpms for 3 more arabeyes projects (katoob, arabic wordlist, khotot), then I had to install the arabized gqview po file, install drupal and patch it to use backported locale module then import arabic po file then choose a desktop background, set browser homepage and set defaults for the IRC client.
the I had to run the script and wait for 15 minutes (yes 15 whole minutes), the rest was lots of very hard labor involving testing iso under qemu, burning it and testing it on 3 pcs.
but it was worth all the effort, MohammedSameer will be using it in AsiaSource to demonstrate FOSS arabization, so this makes bin drake the official asia source arabic caucus distro hah try to beat that ATOS
oh yeah and I just realized I've been in the distro making business for soo long since the days I used to make these Mandrake extras cds, I regularly make a 2 cd edition of mandrake to be used in EGLUG courses (started with the installfest), and I regularly make a Mandrake ultimate edition that keeps growing and growing (13cds so far), this makes me and phaeronix the only Arabic distro makers who actually updates their distro, all I need is catchy nationalistic or jahidy names for the distros.
if anyone is interested in trying this out get it from my rsync server @ home.manalaa.net::pub/software/bin_drake.iso
if you have any good revolutionary names for the 2cd mandrake and the 13+cd ultimate edition please tell me one can never have too much PR, besides I might end up in heaven because of it, who knows.
Comments
coool really cool :)
nothing more to say :P about the names
peace
Live Free Or Die...
a kde based distro ..
could be named كيد العوازل !
I'll try not to be hot-headed
Contrary to my usual self, recent events have taught me to be patient. So I'll assume three intents for this post: serious - troll - joke.
In any of these cases I still refuse that phaeronix be put on the list like this. This makes me biased to choose the "serious". Phaeronix is not about a jihad or arabic everything. It's not about wallpapers or splash screens. Contrary to common belief there is work real work behind phaeronix.
Anyway here is not the right place to advertise or campaign ( hey I forgot to run for moderator-ship.. damn! ) . Any body who took the time to try my liveCD or walked past my website, knows there is serious work done. The fact that I am alone makes the work quite slow, so if you want to help you are welcome ( oops here I go advertising again ).
And hey I didn't fail a single year in med school, except if you are betfawel 3alaya, in that case '7amsa we '7mesa and all that stuff.
If this is a troll, then don't feed the troll.
Aho da elly kan na2es.
I'm there too
-- I was known as Uniball!
WWW: http://www.foolab.org/
Quote "c u next life time then when i come back as a mug of tea :P"
i didn't try debian woody , b
i didn't try debian woody , but i uniball loves it so i wanna give a try the best thing in my opinion in phaeronix that it uses xfce and have support for win modem which makes beginners able to test the net, but knoppix is more attractive , it's kde.
ooh so outdated
Come on man, you should have known by now that my desktop is not xfce anymore. Besides it's your own opinion that KDE is better, not everyone's. Not to flame the DE war or anything.
it's seems that i'm missing a
it's seems that i'm missing alot, BTW i'm not KDE lover , i just like to use simple window managers but kde look is great when it uses x transparent. so why don't u add some screenshots on ur site
TALIBANIX
Hey, stop that. Talibanix was my idea. Here is what I want to put in it. It is geared toward the general terrorist and has nothing to do with religion.
Some serious talk
I know this blog post is a mix of sarcasm, ranting and trolling but there's no harm of some serious talk.
The bitter sarcasm of nationalistically driven distros is not justified in my opinion. I'm sure the Brazillains/Russians/Chinese/Nolandians brag there own distros for no reason except being a fake national pride (put aside the fact that these distros fulfill the technical localization needs). So why we the Arabs who have a strange mix of self-depreciation and self-pride are not entitled such behavior? Besides, you (Alaa, correct me if I'm wrong) are strong believer of the neccessity of arabization and if I recall correctly you grew to believe that even the arabization of the GUI is demanded.
Lets come to the religion driven distros and all that talk about Jihad and long beards.There's only one distro of those you mentioned is supposingly motivated by what you might consider Islamic fundemantalism. Yet your blog entry gives the impression that most Arab distros are for fundemantalistic reasons.
Last related point, the essentiality of cultural/political/economical independance is not our own invention, at least the economical one. Even Westerners adopt the conspiracy theory when it comes to Microsoft, monopoly and vendor locking. The majority of Arabs are by default conspiracy theorists so again we are entitled to such attitude.
lol too serious
there is absolutly no point in taking my post seriously, but if you insist here is a reply.
I never said this was unique to us Arabs, tha fact that other people make sofa distros and brag about them with religious, nationalistic or revolutionary speech doesn't change my opinion on such distros.
as for the cultural/political/economical independance, I'm all for it, hell a big point I make in my FOSS advocacy stints is about how FOSS helps economical independance, but the joke was not about that, some of these sofa distros claim that unless you use an Arabic distro you are not independant, they make it as if what matters is tha nationality behind the distro makers and not license and the rights you have while using it, the ATOS folks went as far as accusing us of being agents of foreign powers and microsofties for distributiin Mandrake and RedHat
if this ain't funny I don't know what is.
having your own distro does not win you cultural independance, being a revolutionary, nationalist, ultra pious or whatever doesn't change your technology needs considerably if thats the only reason behind your distro then its a joke.
and you say there is no religious fundementalism in the other distros, I'm sorry to disagree most arabic speech these days is full of (what is by my standards) religious fundementalism, I've no beef with that people are entitled to their opinions and beliefs, and I have a right to make jokes.
I believe in the importance of localization yes, and my believe in it is growing everyday, but how did these distros help arabization? hell if you need to install a special distro to get decent arabization then we failed, localization should be seamless and everywhere.
besides it really was a joke, for instance phaeronix is in the joke for completeness, none of what I ranted about applies to phaeronix (except it being a sofa distro, but hey FOSS can cater to very small groups no harm in that).
Alaa
"i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"
Another thing to add to alaa
Another thing to add to alaa and all this distros are based on LFS.
maslan
Another thing to add to alaa
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Another thing to (add to alaa) and all this distros are based on LFS.
the word "ADD" doesn't really match with the name "Alaa" and his name is Alaa not alaa .. with a Capital 'A' if you know what doest that mean ;)
i mean "to alaa's words" , an
i mean "to alaa's words" , and it's not so important to punct. here and this should be considered offtopic