RE: ttf and arabic

["Youssef Adnan" <Youssef dot Adnan at itworx dot com>]

Hello,

I doubt that Debian is a good choice for newbies though. In the case of
Arab countries, let's face the truth. Software piracy is something that
we see everyday. To get Linux in here, we have to give the people a
user-friendly OS with enough applications to cover the basic needs. The
fact that it's free is of zero importance to the Arab user since Windows
is "free" too.

I recently installed XP and checked it out. God it is so user-friendly
that I got frustrated. To tell you the truth, I disabled many of the
wizards and some of the new features in it. 

Now, how to compete with such user-friendly OS? We all know the truth;
it's the GUI layer that interests the normal user. Who cares what
technologies or what libraries are implemented in the OS? As from my
experience, XP is even more stable that 2k, so what does a user need.
Why will they change to Linux? We have to give them reasons. 

Let's not target the common user now. They're relaxed with what they
have. I was very happy to see Linux getting on more servers here in
Egypt. I was extremely happy when I saw it gaining more grounds in
Universities. And this is where we should stress: Universities and
schools. Those are the decision makers of the near future. We've already
passed the point of whether to use Linux or not. Linux wasn't known to
most of the people in the Arab world three or four years ago. Now it is.
You won't find one that doesn't know it. The point is: let's get the
people who can advertise for it to increase. Those are easily located in
the nearest University. Let's hold sessions for those people. I'd like
to give you one more hint: You will be surprised by the number of Arabic
speaking magazines that would like to get words about Linux from the
experts. Get the address of a magazine and write them, check it out!
When I did this in the past, I ended up with a series of five articles.
One of them described how to install SuSE Linux in 13 pages. You can do
this too guys. It took me less than five hours with a friend of mine to
get the article ready with screenshots. 

Next, we have to unify our efforts. I've had enough of the OS war,
enough of the distributions war and even more, enough of the desktop
war. In my opinion, I'll use whatever I like and you use whatever you
like is the solution. We need to make a solution to the differences so
that we speak the same language. This list and others are very active as
far as I'm concerned. We will always get the question: I'm a newbie.
Which Linux distributions shall I use? This should have a common answer.
The list should support a number of distributions. How will we be able
to support new comers? Remember that each of us can be expert at one
distribution, but how far will we be able to help? So, according to the
number of experts at a distribution, the answer should be.

As for the Gnome and KDE war, it's a very disappointing subject to talk
about. Yet, the outcome has proven to be a productive competition
between the two projects which yields to the fact that it was actually a
good thing. What I fear is the misuse of this subject that could lead to
problems on the lists. I've seen many of those but I don't know how to
solve such problems.

I liked the pango project so much in the fact that it's a base library
that can be integrated in both Gnome and KDE. Yet, Qt now supports
Arabic and so does KDE respectably. This means that again, there will be
separation in the base libraries. I don't know what the status of both
is going to be, but let's think generic. Let's not get tied to a desktop
environment. Why would we do if the user is currently tied to Windows?
Aren't we speaking freedom? I've seen some people talking about licq on
another Arabic mailing list. The licq is one great example of how UI can
be a plugin. It's really well designed. Take a look at it guys if you
got sometime. It's really interesting.

Sorry for such long email. It's along reply, but it's a sum up of what
I've been noticing lately. Although I haven't been contributing to any
of the development or the management of the Arabization projects lately,
I think that I could at least try to sum our forces together. :)


Linux doesn't need more power. It only needs advertising! We don't need
more power, we only need to unite!

Thanks
-Youssef



-----Original Message-----
From: Chahine M. Hamila [mailto:mch at chaham dot com] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2001 5:10 PM
To: general at arabeyes dot org
Subject: Re: ttf and arabic

Youssef Adnan wrote:

> I highly suggest that you get the latest version of Mandrake. TTFs are
> supported out of the box.

Debian has been supporting TTFs for years now as well.