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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
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/
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.
On modern desktops, Arabic works just fine.
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.
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.