since we got lots of traffic on this thread without being any closer to actually reaching a conclusion here is more noise to add to the conversation.
as an experiment I decided to try for myself and see how challenging it will be to build an arabized LiveCD on top of a mainstream distro that has decent arabic support out of the box. this is not an attempt to suggest we use this method for arabbix at all, this is just an attempt to get a sense of proportion, I have the feeling that we're treating the subject as if it is a major feat while it might in fact be a trivial thing. my first alpha of the Mandrake Arabized liveCD was done in less than an hour (ok I'll be honest I wasted a whole day playing with qemu until I decided to just bite the bullet and do a reboot, but once qemu was out of the way it really took an hour). this included * installing a clean mandrake 10.1 community install using Arabic locale * installing the mklivecd script (specially made for mandrake) * reading the mklivecd howto * running mklivecd to generate an iso * burning the iso * giving the cd a quick 5 minutes spin at the moment I got several things broken, all minor from a technical point of view (but critical from a user point of view) * I get a weird XKB related error message in a runic ancient forgotten language that uses arabic script, I recognise each word as an arabic one but together they make absolutely no sense, so I've no idea how to fix that :-) * mandrake menus are b0rked, one needs to run update-menus after the thing boots, then they work fine * OpenOffice uses a non arabic font for the interface so nothing makes any sense the first two problems are in the livecd and not in the mandrake install itself, the 3rd one is a problem in the actual mandrake install that needs to be fixed before the iso is generated. so my conclusion is it is indeed a trivial process to build an arabized livecd based on a mainstream distro, a bit of testing and tweaking is all it involves. what does this mean, does this add any new info to the arabbix discussion? you tell me. cheers, Alaa -- http://www.manalaa.net ultimate_answer_t deep_thought(void) { sleep(years2secs(7500000)); return 42; }
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