You are in the city of my thoughts.. so don't freak out because I know the place so well.. I'll hold your hand step by step because the electricity hasn't reach here yet.. only if you leave your mind at the doorway.. because it will be annoyed so much if it look behind and find every thing look differant than the previous look..! anyhow.. forget about all this.. because you will never get out Just like you got in.. Never..!!

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Arabization of the Computer.. all you have to do is "To do"..!!

I know it seems like stupid to right about Arabization -turn the computer look and feel and work from English to Arabic- in my English blog, But I really have a very good reason..
you are Arabic person reading an English blog (You could be not Arabic if you want to.. but I mean Arabs here), which means you love computer.. so you learnd English to use it easly or you proceed through because you speak English already, and means also you were in the darknesses of despair before 1995 when Microsoft sympathize with you and made an Arabic iterface for windows.. but you convinced yourself from 95 till Vista that those Arabic GUIs (Graphic User Interface)s are dumb and the true computer language is English..
You maybe right in one thing: Windows Arabic GUIs are dumb.. pretty dumb..because from 95 till now arabic is NOT fully supported in Windows..! the interface had never been fully translated, and many programs had difficulties to work under Arabic version (Microsoft never used multi language interface till Vista appeared).

Linux with Arabic interface.. click the photo to look closer ;)

After the urge for Arabic is killed in many expert computer users, some fresh users joined and wanted to use Arabic. they heard about Linux and open source programs, but they weren't fresh enough to convert themselves from windows that easy. they alse learned -which was right then- that Linux Don't support Arabic but this is another story..
Linux is a free community.. which means there is no Microsoft to blame.. for example, when I got my first Linux cd and start installing it, I went crazy..! in "choosing language" screen there was something like 100 language including some you never know that is exists..! it is discrimination..? I also was stupid enough to think so especially when I found Hebrew..!
but as I said, there is no Microsoft to blame.. also there is no discrimination there..
Linux is a free open community of programmers all around the world.. and when linux speaks a language, you have to know that some language speaking programmers wanted to translate Linux from English to their language.. thats what happen in Hebrew and Xhosa and any of these languages.. Arabic not included simply because Arabic programmers didn't bother to translate Linux to Arabic, because they used to use it in English, and we also used to import technology not to produce it, and this is a pretty hard work -which means is not impossible- to turn an English speaking system to Arabic, considering stuff like switching text direction and connecting letters to each other and kashida and other things..
But now, things are better.. almost 60 or 70% of Linux distributions -I'll tell you later what a distribution is-has an Arabic interface or at least Arabic support.. Also, arabs had begun to make their very own distributions (they made 10 or so)
So, we woke up.. late as usual but we did..
We learned how to "do" not to "wait"..!!

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