Minbar 0.2 packages have been produced for ubuntu and debian. Please follow this link to my minbar 0.2 post to get them. They are linked at the end.

http://djihed.com/minbar/minbar-02-released

The first release of Minbar was somewhat hurried, and was more intended for personal use, and as a test of whether Muslim Gnome users really want something like this.

It turns out a lot of people are happy about the idea, and there is an acceptable level of adoption amongst Gnome users. Thanks everyone! This encouraged me to work together a better Minbar for next release, and may be, just may be, build it and distribute for Windows.
So this is meant to get some ideas from people on what they want. Currently I am thinking of:

• City names list, choosing a city instead of entering its details.
• Hide window on start-up (Already in CVS).
• Windows port.
• Fix the menu icon.
• Package it for deb and rpm distributions.
• …? (Your idea here)

Any more?

Alriyadh, a popular Saudi newspaper were kind enough to do an interview with me about CDMaftooh.

I took the opportunity to voice concerns about the Arabic Open Source movement, and voice out that we do actually need governmental/educational help to spread the word.

They published the interview in their 13th March 2007 issue. I’d love to get a hard copy from any of you my Saudi brothers! The server took a hard beating on that day, I thought It wouldn’t make it through, but it did.

Read the interview, It is in Arabic.

So over the last two weeks I have been surveying the Internet for Arabic technical sites. Things like news sources, development websites, translation websites, even forums, blogs, etc.

One thing I noticed being shared by most of these resources is mediocrity. It’s hard to find some team that is truly exceptional, apart from the good work eglug has shown in organising successful Linux installfests, and Arabeyes’s ITL library and some other bits, there is not much to be really proud of.

However, it seems that every person or small team are happy in their own little world trying to be it when it comes to IT. There is hardly any cooperation. The ego is strong, there is little leadership, most count on only what they do and dismiss the rest. In short, there is much competition on doing nothing or very little. There are 5 or 6 half dead half alive Arabic distributions, with pretty much one or two at most developers, how you can sustain a distribution on your own for a long time, I am not sure. Nobody does/did it. And Nobody wants to cooperate with the next guy. Heck, I have seen people trying to invent an OS from the ground up!

After a while, some eventually sadly get burnt and give it up all together, and I don’t fault them. The work is difficult, there is very little incentive to produce more. People work in parallel and nobody knows what exists. Take as an example, the recent excellent initiative to produce OOo documentation: there are still half a dozen other teams out there trying to reinvent the same wheel. Once done, of course, as they did not build up on previous work, nobody notices their work and they will give up because it seems like nobody is using it.

There is one thing for sure though, we all at some point share the same motivation: Improving Arabic Support for OSS and developing Arabic tools etc. Let me tell you however that the path is difficult, it requires patience, a lot less ego stroking and more cooperation. I am sure you all know the story of the old man who wanted to teach his children about the importance of unity using wood sticks…

* ego: the exaggerated sense of self importance.