Re: Arabbix's which distro to work with

[Alaa Abd El Fattah <alaa at eglug dot org>]

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;
}