Arabbic Update

[Anmar Oueja <anmar at canada dot com>]

Greetings Earthlings:

Well after downloading a few gigs of ISO's from GNOPPIX, KNOPPIX, and 
MORPHIX I decided to base all future developement work on MORPHIX 
(morphix.sf.net).

Before I explain why I chose MORPHIX, here is my criteria I used to 
evaluate each of the CDs:

1. Must support GNOME since we have full Arabic localisation (thanks 
GNOME team). KDE Arabisation is not complete yet. (that takes KNOPPIX 
out of the picture)

2. Make the size as small as possible. Although we are going to 
distribute these CDs (If we find a sponsor), people want to download it 
so we should be concious of that.

3. Easy to localize (based on a well built distribution) Debian 
preferrably ;)

4. Easy to install on hard disk. (some people might like what they see 
and decide to use linux as a full time OS)

5. Easy to further improve and extend

6. Easy to customize with Arabeyes.org logos and colours.

7. Must fit on one CD

8. Must have an active community of developers for future enhancements 
and support

Here are the reasons why i have decided to use MORPHIX:

1. It is modular so we can bunch our entire Arabization effort in one 
module instead of mucking with the whole distribution.

2. relatively smallish . Knoppix is close to 700 MB . MORPHIX is 440 MB

3. Although localization docs are not present, the mailing lists are 
plenty helpful and the people are quite nice. All of the Live-CD's i 
have examined are based on Debian (whooo :))

4. MORPHIX comes with a GTK2 tool that installs the entire CD on the 
hard disk of choice (non of the examined Live-CDs have that). The tool 
can be easily localized to Arabic so users can install the entire OS on 
their Hard disk and use a fully localized linux-based OS

5. The community is active and willing. That says alot about the future 
of this live-CD :)

Other than the mentioned points above, all Live-CDs are equal.

Let me know what you think.

Anmar