Anmar, good improvements !! I spent close to 3 hours playing around the
new 0.6 release of Arabbix and have the following comments (note this is
not to be critical, but comprehensive and thorough - so don't be discouraged
by the length of amount of my notes below). The break-down noted is listed
in 2 categories (based on my humble opinion), those that are critical and
must be fixed and looked into and those that are minor and/or even frivolous.
Without a doubt, Arabbix as it stands now for a new user certainly has the
much-needed "WOW" affect, we just need to add more and verify functionality
to make this something VERY useful for any tester and/or user.
Critical/Must:
--------------
+ Lilo
- Background is much nicer than before, but the mention of arabeyes.org
is too small (vertically listed top-left). I would suggest making it
MUCH bigger and leaving it vertically listed (take the entire height
of the screen to list Arabeyes.org and make it 5-10x larger).
- Use nicer Arabic fonts (for the press F2 strings)
+ Once logged-in, desktop icons are not aligned and seem more randomly
placed than before (a nice/neat alignment is a must)
+ Root background image is very nice, but we need a bigger mention of
www.arabeyes.org
+ Correct misspelled Arabic Icon "Abda-a Hunna" (replace Alef_Maksura
with Alef - Duali is your friend :-)
+ Exit does a restart and not a 'shutdown -h'
+ mlterm does not work; upon a start I get "open_screen_intern() failed"
error
+ vim does not have Arabic support; start vim and do ':version' and the
"-arabic" it should be "+arabic" which means Arabic support was not
compiled (or included at compile time).
+ Even with 'lang=us' Mozilla came-up with Arabic localization (didn't
see any means to switch it over to english, but this should not happen,
it needs to work properly in both modes)
+ No Sound abilities; sound did not work ('morphix alsa' did nothing as well)
+ USB support is noted included
- In an attempt to debug, I started 'usbview' and it complained with
"Can not open file /proc/bus/usb/devices - verify USB is compiled
into the kernel"
+ No print abilities and/or print config info
- Tried printing from within Katoob (it crashed I believe), from OpenOffice,
from Mozilla -- nothing worked
+ Unable to play any streaming audio. Start Mozilla and go to kcrwmusic.com
and click on any format - I think we're missing some Mozilla plugins
+ The current bottom-panel is too unorganized, I suggest better grouping.
Look the link noted below - I tried to put worth what I have in mind,
http://www.arabeyes.org/~nadim/tmp/my_arabbix.png
Verbally, have the following instead of what's listed there now,
- Gnome
- Mozilla
- Internet
- Xchat
- Gaim
- gFtp
etc.etc
- Office or Publishing or Applications
- OpenOffice
- Dia
- Katoob
- Evolution
- Dict
etc.etc
- Multimedia
- Gimp
- Music.Player
- CD player
- Video apps
etc.etc
- Docs (both arabic and english)
- HowTos
- FAQ
- Report Bugs
etc.etc
- Arabeyes (both arabic and english)
- Linux/Open.Source Intro
- Arabeyes' about page
- Arabeyes' help-us plug
The screenshot noted does all this; what would be needed is to replace
that mushroom icon with Arabeyes' logo :-) and to include all the docs
(howtos/FAQ/etc). The about and intro are done, what about the others ?
Minor/Nice-to-have:
-------------------
+ Lilo
- Notes version 0.5 (should be updated per release)
- Is there a way to list the options if I scroll past the graphical
menu to know what options I have ?
- Is it worth replacing 'morphix' with 'arabbix' for such things
as the 'morphix lang=us' commands ? Would mean you'd need a new
single link (ln -s morphix arabbix); might be simple enough to do.
- Is it possible to enter multiple options such as 'morphix lang=us alsa' ?
+ What is the password needed for when one locks the screen (in the Gnome
main menu - bottom-panel) ?
+ Lots of various permission issues. I suggest you ditch user 'morph' and
simply login as 'root' by default (give him 'arabeyes' as a password).
+ Include a short audio file (song) and video file to test out the various
multimedia apps,
- Make them short and sweet with Arabic content (I can provide you some)
- Seems like a good place to put them would be /home/morph/Music
+ tcsh and emacs are not installed :-)
+ Newbies might get very confused with transparent xterms/Xchat/etc, I
suggest you disable them by default yet note somewhere how they can
be enabled.
+ Gnomemeeting has Anmar's name and email as default (should be blank)
+ 'locate' doesn't have its cache to do searches - would it worth adding
that to the distro ?
+ Input method on most forms did not list Arabic (various other langs were
noted including Vietnamese). Right click on a any form.
+ The resulting clock from 'gdesklets' needs to be lowered since its hiding
our background logo - I wasn't able to lower it by hand for some reason.
+ Fonts within mozilla (english) are horrid (that's my fault, I've already
replaced the Almothana english fonts with the Open Source Veranda that
Anmar mailed me and its available already (Anmar, you should have gotten
a private email from me)).
+ The default theme shipping with the distro is lost if one tries other
themes - can the default arabbix theme be stored as say 'arabeyes' or
similar ?
+ Dictionary appt (2.2.1) has harakat problem - wasn't Mr. Ahmad Twaijry
working on a replacement ?
+ Dia when run from xterm (since there were no menu/desktop icons) produces
some Glib warnings
+ Katoob seems to core (well, it simply disappears) if one attempts to print.
M.Sameer please look into what Katoob does if you don't have a printer and
you attempt to print.
+ Make sure all items on the bottom-panel have a "name" associated with them
so you see what they are when you hover over them.
+ I was not able to do any apt-get/apt-cache stuff due to permissions,
again logging in as 'root' might be helpful in solving alot of permission
problems. Was looking to install a small application - is that possible ?
+ I did NOT test dailup/PPP support -- my cablemodem worked out of the box :-)
Again, I know this might seem overwhelming, but if you look at it with
any detail alot of these things should be simple to fix. I meant to be,
as noted, thorough and not overbearing and I'd love to make these changes
myself, but I'm not aware of how to do that and its too late to ask for
instructions now (our deadline is upon us).
Let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
Keep up the splendid(c) work :-)
Salam.
- Nadim
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