yes you read it right, my little GNU/Linux box runs the worlds most advanced state of the art Music Purchase decision support systems, we're talking all the buzzwords here, XML enabled Webservices and distributed processing peer2peer capability all for the sake of helping me decide how to spend 20$ online

now to tell you what all this is about, as explained here I decided to pay for some of the free music I love.

Affordable, Accessible computing

This is an attempt to articulate few things I been thinking about for a long time, the thoughts here where hashed out while attempting to join the WSIS Arab NGO Caucus and through discussions with the /dev/cabal folks and Adel El Zaim from IDRC.

Warning

thats about the end of the organized well thought out part of this document, my mind is very jumbled, I'm writing this down to help me

oh well in the true EGLUG tradition here is my todo that never gets done for 2005, this is more of an action wishlist, some stuff is really my todo but most is things I wish EGLUG would do and I hope I'll find others who'll help.

EGLUG Website

• Start the EGLUG democratic election process
  • post an anouncement asking seniors to run AGAIN
  • this time deploy the freaking ranking vote module (which is ready folks)

I've been playing around with drupal 4.5 on my website for a while now.

now I did a live test of an EGLUG upgrade, you can see the result on http://test.eglug.org

this is a complete mirror of EGLUG as it stands an hour ago but upgraded to 4.5, please test it and break it, but don't use it for actual content submission.

issues

• backported locale module incompatible, delete all locale table before upgrade
• contrib navigation module conflicts with menu system, delete its tables
• taxonomy_image data lost (tis ok we only have one configured so far)
• flexinode images lost (need to manually fix all reviews :-(

drupal 4.5 was released a few weeks ago, it has many improvements and new features and IMO we should upgrade EGLUG installation ASAP

tasks required for the upgrade:

1. port our custom modules to 4.5
   • LinCount (done by MohammedSameer)
   • Bidi (done by MohammedSameer)
2. port contrib modules we use
   • glossary
   • wiki (done by alaa with help of patch found on drupal.org)
   • remindme (removed)
   • navigation (deprecated)
   • members (done???)
   • article (done)
   • csvfilter (done)
   • event (done)
   • flexinode (done)
   • htmlcorrector (done)
   • image (done)
   • notify (done)
   • privatemsg (done)

last saturday while on my vacation I went with MohammedSammeer and Manal to Alex where we had a big EGLUG social gathering.

we met all of EGLUG Alex members except for OneOfOne who found out he was alergic to clean air and sunlight (the whole EGLUG alex population consists of DarknessWolf, LinuxAwy and Sherbo).

we had great fun at downtown alex which is not realy downtown alex, then at downtown alex wich is proper downtown alex, we found out alexandrian geeks don't know anything about their city and had to consult google in order to locate kadora, a net cafe, a coffee shop or even the sea (yes they did not know where the sea was).

after wasting a couple of days exploring the great Mandrake educational software I'm finaly back on track (don't try 3d filemanagers its a farce).

• agrep - cool a fuzzy grep, a forgiving grep, grep that looks for aproximate matches, what more can you ask for,
• clamav in case you don't know about it already, this is the best Free anti virus, you use it to scan files going to windows machines of course ;-)
• binstat tool to give you statistics about your system binary files, very useful for stripping down a distro, tells you how many unused libraries you have, how many unstripped binaries, how many duplicate binaries and man pages etc.

Day 3 of the great RPM race most of the day wasted on trying to get OpenGroupWare to work

• TeXmacs - scientific wordprocessor, kinda like a more powerful, more complex LyX, with great integration with tools like gnuplot, octave, yacas etc.
• mlview - gtk based xml editor, not bad but nothing beats emacs-psgml mode, conglomerate has a more sane UI, but is way to underfeatured at the moment.
• vigor - what can I say I may even move to vi because of that.
• asp - french eschool package, covering official school cariculum, test, grading etc, very simple but very effective.

day two of whole lotta software tests.

ouch lots of stuff doesn't work or just plain crashes, is this the FOSS quality we're proud off?? maybe these are packaging problems (some of this stuff did not change for years).

anyways here goes

• cssed - thats a CSS editor, no problems here but it doesn't realy add much, its just a spec aware editor, it can help you by converting the spec to dialogs, menus and forms, but it isn't realy smart, it does't parse your doc or the html it references it doesn't add anything that isn't easily available in emacs.
• DDD - data centric debugger, this is by far the best and most inovative debugging frontend ever, focus is on data, in addition to typical debugger features it draws data structures, plots variables over time, plots arrays and matrices and traces pointers all over the memory space, and best of all it works for C, C++, BASH, Perl and PHP (when will they add python).

Building a community media center and a media library in Abu Al Nomros is turning out to be a very interesting job.

I need to find decent FOSS apps for all sorts of use cases, to be ready for the future I decided to spend a few days going through all the packages available to Mandrake.

I'm testing using cooker since it has more packages, and maybe I'll get to post a bug report or two.

Anyways, I'll keep track of the packages I find promising here, and maybe later I'll review some of them

• kaspaliste - kde bibliography tool, powerful, loads of features, bibtext integration, interface is as good as a webbased thing though, see no point in KDE if it won't add a more friendly UI.

follows is a quick log of all searches attempted on the eglug website for the duration drupal keeps logs (what did I configure this to be? 6 weeks maybe?)

its quite interesting, the number indicates the number of duplicate searches, the weird node and comment searches are lame DOS attempts

    319 'node'
    158 'comment'
    105 'aggregator'
     88 ''
     58 'taxonomy'
      8 'subtitles'
      7 'نبذه عن الينوكس'
      5 'wikisyntax'
      5 'sex'
      5 'modem'
      5 'free courses'
      4 'forum'
      4 'charter'
      3 'what's the charter ?'
      3 ' subtitles executive target'

 

Day 1

Introduction to Free and Open Source Software

• Free Software ideals
• Open Source philosophy
• benefits

The GNU/Linux platform

• benefits
• nature

Installing GNU/Linux

• partitioning
• locale select
• package selection
• hardware detection
• network settings
• bootloader
• user accounts

Basic Desktop usage

• introduce Gnome
• introduce KDE
• favor KDE

Day 2

Basic Desktop usage

• file management
• panel navitgation
• desktop configuration
• mention differences

Common Applications Office

• openoffice
• mention alternatives
• compatibility

keeping track of what I done already in drupal, otherwise we'll get lost and have a horible time upgrading.

hmm this is getting to be very long maybe I should split it wala do it real blog style and report each day on its own post.

patches:

1. made TitleModule use double square brackets for title link for compatibility with WikiModule
2. disabled turning white spaces leaded paragraphs into pre tagged paragraphs in WikiModule
3. changed hardcoded width="100%" in tables used in image module for compatibility with our current CSS layout.
4. patched new php template default theme main.tpl

This Blog entry was sent by email to the address handler@eglug.manalaa.net.

isn't drupal cool?

supposedly this modules has a certain commands language that allows one to contribute anywhere, yet to find any documentation for this though :-(

cheers, Alaa