while activity here, eglug.org, #eglug and #phaeronix was really low the past week, I assure you we are all still alive and well.
On a side note, here's an update on the stuff in the upcoming version of the LiveCD:
-Updates most notably OOO 1.1.3 and jre1.5
-Hardware detection script: error fixing, and huge speed improvement ( no more compiles ).
-UI : no more xfce dependency, only ROX and gkrellm. This spared some memory.
-less stuff extracted to RAM on startup.
-Better way of ejecting the liveCD on shutdown. ( could still be improved though ).
-As a result of the last two the LiveCD can now boot with just 64Mb of RAM available and still have 24Mb free after the desktop is up. ( confirmed in qemu ).

okay I hope this is final.

I have tried to update the included software, and fix as many bugs as i can find.

I hope it works for you. I am too tired to talk. I will try to fix up my website at phaeronix.net soon.

Meanwhile:

http://www.elkasrelaini.com/linux/phaeronix-0-77.iso http://www.elkasrelaini.com/linux/phaeronix-0-77.md5sum

which contains : 24286fcba582db81466ffb03d69f945c phaeronix-0-77.iso

I will upload it elsewhere soon.

UPDATE:

okay bitorrent is working now thanks to Uniball. You can find it on here:

http://www.elkasrelaini.com/linux/phaeronix-0-77.iso.torrent

After excruciating effort I managed to roll out 0.77 before the start of this academic year.

http://www.eglug.org/node/view/513

This year I will be really busy as I intend to get higher grades, so I won't be that active in development. Don't get me wrong I won't vanish. I will still answer questions and collect bug reports and work on them when I can.. but I don't think there will be big changes.
I was discussing this with Youssef Assad , Uniball and DjKing and we decided someone could take over maintaining the project with my help. Anyone with reasonable skill and willing to spend time can be of help. After all, a team is much better than one person. DjKing accepted the responsibility but I failed to give him the ISO before he left to Kuwait (shame on me).

Hi again. It's been a long time since my last blog. It's about time. I am very close to uploading a new full iso that hopefully is more robust than the last one. Also I will be making a mini-cd iso which will contain only the GUI but no real programs. this will help ppl who want to bugfix hw detection and such things with me, Other major event are also about to happen but I will hold back onto that until they finalize. On a sidenote : After about 55 downloads of the ISO I didn't get a single report except from alaa. I wish ppl would realise that the bandwidth they used is expensive ( morally not literally ).

I was surprised today to find that the creative modem blaster v.90 DI5663 is a HSFi modem and works with the conxant drivers...

Good for me!

I contacted Mohammed elzubeir and he turned out to be in dubai. I will try to attend this week's dubai LUG meeting as he suggested.

don't get so excited I only installed it on my father's pc. Nothing unusual. Grubconf failing miserably everytime. cya later.

Okay since I am leaving tomorrow and I couldn't give the ISO to Mohammed Sameer I uploaded it at college.

http://linux.elkasrelaini.com/phaeronix.iso

md5sum : 20cd07f8671b8797785535d2dddcdaac

I just woke up now after a period ( 96 hours ) of continuous travelling, sleepless. From alex to agamy to tanta to sakkia to college.

I went to sakkia on monday as advertised, I reached there at 9:45am waited till 11:00am before only two people showed up. So I dumped my session papers and I setteled for a one to one approach in discussion. They asked a lot of questions, especially on how to become a good user in linux without depending on some pretty gui. Hopefully I answered them all.

I left sakkia at about 1:45pm shattered not only from lack of sleep but also because I felt like nobody was interested.

Today I was forced to give the debugging session at the sakia. I had come prepared to help Mohammed Sameer in presenting the session but I was not prepared to give the whole session on my own. I don't know the impression I gave but I tried my best to be friendly. After I finished I had the opportunity to plant phaeronix0.75b on one of the sakia's computers and added it to the mandrake boot menu ( they said they needed mandrake for the culug courses ).

I am so sorry I didn't attend the firewall session, something urgent came up. However I will ISA attend the bugfixing session tomorrow (er today).

Speaking of bugfixing I got a round to fixing the openbox patch so that it no longer messes the taskbar text. I will submit the change to MohammedSameer. Yupee.

Gnome-meeting another compilation from hell, is now in place, it remains however to be seen if it works ( I suspect the LDAP server will be a problem, and I don't know scratch about LDAP ).

Cups patch works with both stable and development versions of cups. I viewed the ps file output using gs and gsx (I made a crazy way to force it to use gtk2+ and it worked hehe).

The text is bidi and shaped but there are little gaps between the letters. This is true for both the patched versions I compiled. I'll have to see if this is to be fixed or is a mistake of my own.

I stumbled across a page on the mozilla bugzilla that says that a patch for arabic text copy bug is already available. I'll look into the matter.

Inkscape turned out to be gtkmm (c++ gtk) which I don't have or use. bummer.

After a long delay I can finally write something down.

I applied the CUPS patch to the stable CUPS source ( with a few failed chunks applied by hand ). I then proceeded to test it by printing to a .ps file ( I haven't a printer ). Then to my astonishment I had no program that could view PostScript. I thought okay little oversight. I pulled out ImageMagick and ggvfrom my archive. They both needed ghostscript. I pulled espgs. It wouldn't compile. BLOCK. I tried to test the new gimp-print with gimp-2 but couldn't get it to work. BLOCK. The whole printing issue is really messy everything is dependent on everything. It's a chicken and egg problem. BLOCK.

I was busy/lazy these days in preparation for the pediatrics oral and clinical exam which was over on saturday.

Now I can turn anew to the finalization of this beta, which is way overdue. I keep resisting new and radical ideas in favor for simple and fast ideas, and trying to fix those little annoying things that keep coming up ( bugs ).

As I expected gaim-vv didn't work, I tried it with two different people, useless. I suspect it may be a mistake I made ( using alsa for sound when compiling libmediastreame perhaps ). I might try again later.

I fixed the silly webmin problem which turned out to be due to my usage of a UTF-8 locale. I used LC_ALL="C" before launching webmin and everything returned to normal. I hope this never recurrs again.

After some hair tearing and screaming I figured out how to exercise the patch found by Mohammed Sameer.

And what do you know... it worked wonderful...

However the input file has to be in UTF-8 first and iconv failed miserably as it messed up the text.

Again MohammedSameer cam to the rescue! His wonderful katoob flawlessy saved the srt file to utf-8. Maybe there's a more friendly way to circumvent the very buggy mplayer interface... for now I have to add the options to the command line...

Seems like all the mics in the world are either broken or on vacation.. Haven't tested gaim-vv

This must have been one of the most hellish compile sessions I ever had.

Finally I compiled gaim-vv and I have it currently open waiting for anyone with a mic or webcam to test it. I don't expect it to work but hey you can't blame me for trying.

I'll keep you updated...

In what felt like a surrueal miracle emerging out of the sky, OpenBox now shows arabic titles correctly...

This miracle was single-handedly programmed by MohammedSameer, programmer extraordinaire!

The patch is ready, it still needs some ironing before getting submitted, then I'll move on to bugging MohammedSameer about doing something else...

His name will certainly be mentioned with honor from now on...

as a sidenote, here's a mini to-do list for the things I want to ask for Mohammed's help in: 1-OpenBox: arabic titles... almost done 2-Mplayer: arabic OSD for subtitles... 3-Xdialog: port to GTK2+...

Well yesterday I spent 5 hours playing Max Payne 2 on my just compiled CVS cedega ( winex 4.0 ). Thanks for OneOfOne for pointing out this update.

I also tried out the latest nVidia drivers.

To tell the truth, the performance of the game at medium quality 640x480x32bit color was truly amazing, far exceeding my windows system.

I noticed in the config file for this winex verion that "Need for Speed Underground" could be run, I hope hotpersuit 2 can run too... This way there would be truly no reason to boot into windows ;)

3:45 am

Aim : automated interactive yet simple install procedure to transfer phaeronix from liveCD to Hdd.

Experiment: primary test of simple install script

subject : my cousin's poor old 8Gb hdd.

procedure : using latest version livecd, I played around with qtparted and it worked fine all with non-destructive resizing. The install script successfully detected a too small partition. Then I settled for a true partition table. I fired up the install script and I had a ready installed system

conclusion : Success of automation of first two steps of installation.

Next Step : Grub auto/interactive setup.

Just now I realized that people don't know that my phaeronix (the liveCD and the hdinstalled system) has been in use by some people for quite some time. It has also been running as an experimental server in the faculty of medicine Cairo University.

I guess I will have to write a full case study soon as alaa suggested, and try to illustrate the powers of linux.

Although I arrived late at the EGLUG late, I liked what I heard.

I also specially liked the attention my liveCD got when I tried it on DjKing's ferrari laptop. It built up some ego ;)

Anyway the laptop's batterly died later and my dev CDRW was trapped inside. Nevertheless I will be releasing the iso soon, for direct download and as a bittorrent too.

Kudos

The main two exams are over.. Now I'm almost free..

Soon I will release phaeronix publicly for the first time.

I think I will be able to attend the meeting on the 3rd...

What time is it? I hope I can attend early right after my clinical lesson.

I am very close to releasing phaeronix v0.75. Just as soon as I finish my written exams.

I also hope that people find it interesting enough to contribute.

Any way I have high hopes..