Flicken's Blog

Ich bin Flicken, ja! Traditional Islam, food, guns, camping, grammar, Canadianna, Arabic, stuff.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Lisan Al-Arab Online & Open Source Desktops

Lisan Al-Arab is now available here. Like many Arabic sites, it doesn't work properly with Firefox. This is one of the reasons I stick with Windows for my primary desktop. Yes, I realize that I can use IE under Linux, but it's not as if sites have been tested with it. Sorry OSS zealots, I don't have time to try the distro du jour, upgrade my packages, etc. I want to log onto my desktop and get stuff done. And yes, I'm willing to pay for the distro to get out of the way and let me get on with my life. Before you flame me, please realize that I am rather competent when it comes to LAMP programming and administration. Linux is a great server-side OS.

Unfortunately, Lisan Al-Arab doesn't seem to be working at Alwaraq any more.

posted by Flicken @ 11:14 PM  

3 Comments:

  • At 10:35 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Can you add your comments to your RSS feed so I don't have to open the site to see them? It defeats the purpose of subscribing to the feed.

    Signed,

    Reader

     

  • At 11:49 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    I was thinking of switching to Ubuntu recently, as I am sick of all the BSOD crashes and so on I get from Windows for no apparent reason (BIOS is updated, RAM is fine etc.)

    I installed it on a partition to try it out, but it doesn't like my USB adsl modem, so had to revert back to Windows. Apparently it is possible with heaps of terminal fiddling and so on, but the whole point of Ubuntu was that it is meant to be able to be used 'out of the box', and easy to use for people who know nothing about Linux and all of its geeky stuff.

    I ended up reverting back to Windows XP because I don't want something to not work whilst I am away or something, as most people have no idea how to even access the terminal, let alone do anything on the command line.

    So I am back to XP, using Firefox and have the IE Tab plugin for it, which seems to work great on those sites which do not appear properly (either due to bad coding or something else). It worked a treat on the link to Lisan al-'Arab in this post.

     

  • At 6:47 AM , Blogger Flicken said...

    My basic breakdown is:

    1. XP on the client.
    2. Debian on the server.

    Alhamdulillah, I never suffer BSODs with Windows XP. I keep my setup clean and I use only legal, original copies of all software.

    Linux's problems on the desktop for me come down to:

    1. Bad Arabic support.
    2. A lack of applications.
    3. Bad hardware support.

    As for the IE plugin for Firefox, I'm sure it works reasonably well, for otherwise there wouldn't be a point to installing it at all. However, for me, I'm just not interested in fiddling with things that don't work. I want the software to get out of the way and let me get on with my work. Furthermore, using IE for me is often a necessity, b/c I work for an e-commerce company and the site needs to be tested in IE, as well as other browsers.

     

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