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The First-Ever Installfest in Egypt
"The atmosphere was just unbelievable; people who had had linux installed realised the LUGgers were overwhelmed and stayed on helping other people with installs, we couldn't burn CDs fast enough, several thousand educational pamphlets were not enough by a wide margin. We were expecting maybe 150 or 200 people throughout the day, but we had already reached that number by 9:45 a.m. (15 minutes before opening!). To the best of our knowledge, the most successful LUG-driven event in the middle-east, certainly the biggest, and one hell of a day that we'll all remember. Note that we are now looking at the possibility of another Installfest during summer at the Bibliotecha Alexandrina and would welcome any extra resources. (A big thanks to MadFarmAnimalz' family who served the volunteers sandwiches carefully wrapped in copies of the GPL preamble and the deCSS code)"
Theres a mirror of the site here
drunk chemists
Anyone else read this (dsc00836)as a triumphant "Nerds Now" after installing Linux?
I've held a couple of small-scale linux "Installfests" in the past, and the availability of CDs (and CD-Rom drives, in some cases) can certainly be an issue.
I found that many computers support Network Booting, which RedHat supports easily. While not every machine supports it, doing net installs on the machines that do frees up CD-ROM drives and CDs for the ones that don't.
Mirrored on an Internet2 site here: ta-da.
|/usr/games/fortune
http://phreakco.us/egypt/
my sig sucks, you dont want to see it....
I setup a mirror in germany at: http://www.infodb.de/linux-egypt.manalaa.net/files /big10/
Was there some cultural aspect that you used to help you out or are Egyptians just dying to get Linux installed?
/*oftopic*/Actually that is one of the reasons i quit a job once,stupid old minded managers beliving that they are more insghtfully blessed with knowledge that Linux is going to die./*end oftopic*/
I am an egyptian my self, and have been using using linux for the last 6 years or so (have been out of the country for almost a couple years though)....A great number of IT staff in Egy. belive in lunux, countires like Egypt need such an OS, they cannot afford costy licenses, espically that copyright laws are strongly enforced over there(ofcorse with the funding of MS and alike).
Now that said, i still belive that an awarness campaign is highly needed for the rest of the IT community(espically IT decision makers) to realize linux, and to realize how fast its gaining ground.
They only need to realize how good its going to do for their business and economy, and no i am not exagerating, our economy cannot withstand costy licenses from whomever.
P.S: Egyptian ppl are known to be very hospitable, its in their culture
The lunatic is in my head
Actually these distros were around, but for newbies it was mandrake (hope not to get flamed for sayin so)
What the hell are you talking about? KDE and GNOME have both been translated to Arabic, and I believe Mozilla as well. Arabic font display using Xft is much nicer than on Windows were the fonts are unreadable unless seriously magnified.
Read again. It was packed for 7 hours - that doesn't mean the same people were there for the entire 7 hours. That's how long the floor was open, and it was packed the entire time.
In India, IBM is aggressively displaying ads for Linux, describing it as a little child who's growing. He helps everyone, saves everyone lots of resources. Brilliant idea, very well executed.
I just can't see why we won't find more linux acceptance at global level
On modern desktops, Arabic works just fine.
I'm not sure, is that a troll or just an incredibly obscure play on words? (sharia/share, conform/conform :) )
Whatever... Egypt, despite being conservative when it comes to social matters, does NOT apply the "sharia" or other islamic laws (and, before you ask, yes, I live here). Actually, the governement is trying very hard to *fight* the supporters of sharia.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
The Sawy Cultural Center is new and the management there was really supportive. We at the LUG feel we can do a lot of work with their support, and one way to get them enthusiastic about linux and open source is for them to feel the power of the open source community. We showed them that day how many people we could pull in, and I'm getting their admin to look at their server stats today ( ; hit it hard people).
:)
If you want to help us, e-mail Khaled Mohsen who was our liason there and just tell him that you as a linux user and/or open source proponent would like to thank him for helping out the Egyptian Linux Users' Group, and make sure to extend the thanks to Mr. Mohamed Al Sawy too through Khaled.
Show me the power of slashdot
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
We were overwhwelmed by the amount of people interested to get the CD's to install it by themselves. We were surprised by the amount of people helping others installing after they got linux installed over their own PC's. We were happy to see this spirit spreading among people after understanding the concepts of free software.
What the hell are you talking about? KDE and GNOME have both been translated to Arabic, and I believe Mozilla as well.
The last I tried (a couple of days ago), Mozilla Mail still had some problems with bidirectional text editing. I'd call it marginally useable at this point - the functionality is there, and works, but there's no acceptable UI to allow new users to access it, and there are some annoyances, like plaintext messages displayed with the wrong directionality. Check out bug 96057 in the Mozilla Bugzilla.
KMail appears to work fine, until you try to read BiDi messages it formats with other mailers. They don't display correctly.
Evolution doesn't seem to support BiDi editing at all.
If there is good support for bidirectional e-mail somewhere, I'd love to hear about it, but I wasn't able to find anything I could give my parents and not hear complaints about me breaking their computer...
You obviously haven't been to the middle east. If anything it's more the opposite -- the only contact some parts of the middle east have with western culture is through the pervasiveness of American crap.
I mean, if all that you saw of the west was Duncan Donuts, Levi's, Ford, Microsoft, Chevron and CNN -- found in American style malls around American style highways full of American cars -- you'd probably not be terribly fond of it. Some of the more insulated countries (I spent a little while in Saudi Arabia recently) are commercially very American, but there's very limited contact between normal people and westerners.
There's much more American junk in the Middle East than you find in Western Europe.
Guys, The rest of the 101 photos are here:o s.sh?ph otos/festival
;-)
1 0/
http://home.manalaa.net/cgi-bin/share_phot
Ok, If the URL gets slashdotted
here is another one:
www.foolab.org/fest
The album was still under construction, you'll be impressed with the results
http://linux-egypt.manalaa.net/files/big
More info @
festival.linux-egypt.org
Call me an insensitive clod, but it's always the same with you geeks: it's great to read, but nobody explains what you are reading about.
Just like when you type "man".
It's great to read, but nobody explains how to do it (like with a few samples or examples).
>man installfest
No man pages found for "installfest" you insensitive clod