Here is a summary of the Linux seminar held in the Information Technology Institute on 14/10/2003 The Infromation Technology Institute in Giza is a goverment sponsored institute. It provides educational courses for almost all IT aspects, including linux courses. The seminar started at 9am in the morning with presentations by IBM, American University in Cairo, Oracle and Sun. We were disappointed by those four presenters. Alaa said in a post to linux-egypt.org about their presentation: ``SUCKED BIG TIME'' and ``BORING'' After the first part of the seminar there was a lunch break and thats when all the action started. Together Alaa abd el Fatah and me stood infront of a machine running Arabbix 0.8. Presenting both Arabbix, GNU/Linux, arabeyes.org and linux-egypt.org to the crowds. The Linux-Egypt booth was the busiest, like a busy stock market. Even people ignored lunch to chat and bombard us with questions. Arabbix was an instant hit. Most of the questions were very basic, like can linux be installed with windows on the same computer ? Will it open my word documents ? Where is photoshop ? can I run 3Dmax on it, Printers, hardware, modems, price,etc.. Our answers were mainly reassuring and we kept asking people to visit our sites for further inquiries. Arabization was a major issue to most people. Arabbix, Katoob and Gimp got lots of praise, specially gimp which made a graphic designer refuse to attend the remaining lectures to try it out, she even pointed to us some features in gimp 1.3 that are lacking in Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunatly due to the limited time we couldn't get people to see more of the applications that are bundeled with Arabbix. We were bombarded with the questions. But nevertheless, the whole arabized interface must have left a good impression. Alaa distributed 10 CDs of Arabbix, and I have learned that one of the major distributer of linux distros in Giza has a copy of Arabbix now. The second part of the seminar was more involving and exciting than the coroparte first part. The Egyptian Meterological Authority (EMA) presented its history of migratinion to linux. Secondly, Mohammed El-Desooky presented Linux-egypt.org and Arabeyes efforts and their acheivments. He also pointed to the rapid growth of linux in the arab world and mentioned all the arabian LUGs as well. Alaa answered questions about Duali, that intrested one of the attendands the most and probably you will hear from alaa about a research paper about arabic spelling in the upcoming days that could improve duali. Alaa also despelled several myths about arabization on linux and met several intresting people that have been all in there own trying to adopt linux, in several organizations and universities. This seminar was a success, we think we delivered the message, GNU/Linux is here in Egypt, there is an active community and arabic GNU/Linux is a reality thanks to arabeyes and others. We reached out for helpless users and showed them that they can get support and we met many interesting and active people. There are also news about more linux seminars and confrences poping around. Salam, Mostafa Hussein -- ----- Get my public cryptographic key to verify my email from: http://www.geocities.com/whirlpool_98/mykey.txt
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