Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

OK, following this post I’ll introduce myself as a Fedora user and packager (not an official ambassador):
Name: Hedayat Vatankhah
IRC Nick: hedayat
IRC Channels: Very little presense

Update: let me add a photo:

New Fonts in Fedora Supporting Persian

As I said before, after exploring some Persian fonts for legal issues and finding that most of them cannot be included in Fedora, I decided to package SIL Arabic script fonts. So I packaged SIL Scheherazadeh and Lateef fonts, and they are available in Fedora repositories now. SIL Scheherazadeh font should be included in Fedora 12 and later versions, as a font required by Persian locale by default. I hope to be able to find some other fonts to include in Fedora. However, almost any Persian user will need the common fonts mentioned earlier, so I’ll create a package of those fonts an put it somewhere for interested people. Those fonts have unclear legal status, but they are expected to be free to distribute and use.

Fedora 12 is coming and I’m waiting for it! I’ve installed Beta version already, but do not use it much, and waiting to completely replace my Fedora 11 with it. It contains many interesting features, and is generally “better”! There are lots of small changes which are not listed, but improves the final experience.

I am going to create a rpmfusion based Fedora remix containing some other interesting software specially considering Persian people. Hopefully, with the help of others like people in fedoraproject.ir, we will create an interesting Fedora remix for Persian people.

I’ll talk about my Yum related plans later!

Barrelfish, My Thesis!

Yesterday, I read about a new OS called Barrelfish in this article in OS news. It is a collaboration between researchers at ETH Zurich and Microsoft Research, an open source multikernel operating system. I liked the idea and decided to get it; I was pretty shocked when I was reading its README file and saw that the OS is created on Linux! As an OS related to Microsoft, I didn’t expect it!

Anyway, it seems that this project is not much related to Microsoft itself, so being developed under Linux is not that shocking!

Well, now I’m much more interested in the OS as I can investigate it in Linux .

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Hey! Finally my M.S. thesis proposal is going to be accepted! I had a hard time finding an interesting (for me!) and new subject for my thesis; but finally it seems that I found it! The title is still not finalized, but should be something like “Autonomous Vision-Based Mapping And Environment Exploration For a Home Robot”, or maybe a little more detailed one by adding something like “Using Particle Filters” or something!

Common Persian (Farsi) Fonts cannot be included in Fedora officially :(

In my previous post I said that I’m going to package some common Persian fonts for Fedora. Unfortunately, both of my target font sets have some unclear legal background, and because of this they cannot be included in Fedora. As far as I know, all of the Persian fonts which are usually used by most of Persian users have this legal issue. I’m not aware of any common Persian font which is officially released as free font (with permission to copy, distribute and modifying the font).

Anyway, I noticed that PakType fonts (which are in Fedora DVD) support Persian too. Also, SIL Arabic Script Fonts support Persian too. So I’ve decided to create package for these fonts. I might create Fedora package for those common fonts too, but they won’t become part of Fedora officially and won’t be included in Fedora repositories.

BTW, I’ve found some other free fonts with Persian support and I’ll try to add them to Fedora too. However, I’m not sure that they are suitable for common use cases.

To sum up, we need some widely usable free Persian fonts, so we need some font designers! I hope that we can find some interested people to design new free fonts…

Persian Fonts in Fedora, PPTP VPN support in F12 by default, Tex Live 2009 and XePersian

Fedora usually provides latest version of softwares with their new features. I really like the fact that I usually should not download latest softwares manually to use their new features. But one exception in this area was TexLive. Currently, the latest version of TexLive in Fedora repositories is TexLive 2007. Fortunately, TexLive 2009 is coming to Fedora (TexLive Fedora Feature) and I’m really interested in that specially that it’ll bring XePersian to Fedora. It’ll allow us to create Persian documents with Tex and it was introduced in TexLive 2008. I was so interested that I added its experimental repository and installed it on my Laptop. Finally, I managed to compile and view some XePersian sample files!

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As far as I know, currently the only Fedora font which completely supports Persian is DejaVu. There are some Arabic fonts but they do not support Persian completely, and so they are unusable for Persian users. They are many beautiful Persian fonts, which every Persian user will need to have on his system. Considering the availability of XePersian in Fedora, the need for nice Persian fonts are even more serious.

Well, I decided to expand my Fedora involvement by packaging some Persian fonts for Fedora (after that I’ll probably jump into Yum world, which is currently “broken by design” in many aspects for every desktop user except people with a fast, always available internet connection! but that’ll need some free time…).
The fonts that I’m currently considering are Farsiweb fonts and IRMUG’s X Series 2 fonts. If you know other nice Persian fonts with a suitable license, please let me know.
In addition to Persian, these fonts provide support for these languages:
Arabic, Azerbaijani (as written in the Arabic script), Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Uzbek, Kurdish, Uighur, old Turkish (Ottoman) and modern Turkish (Roman). X Series 2 fonts support Latin for the sake of completeness.

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If you access Internet through PPTP vpn connection, you’ll certainly like this: according to bug #517297 , Fedora 12 media (DVD and Desktop LiveCD) will contain NetworkManager PPTP plugin by default, so you don’t need to download and install NetworkManager-pptp separately in order to access Internet using Fedora 12. I was amazed how fast it happened, and I wondered why I didn’t do it sooner!

Have fun!

Do you know ANY free/opensource mail client with proper support for RTL languages?!

I didn’t find one! Currently I use Thunderbird with BiDi Mail extension, but it’s not good. This extension is not updated for latest Thunderbird 3 Beta, and it is buggy there. But anyway, I still use it as other alternatives are not better too.

I wonder why none of these mail clients support that! Thunderbird should support it by default. At least, mail clients should have buttons for setting the paragraph direction. This is not a big request! Adding 2 buttons for setting paragraph direction in HTML messages is not too much IMHO!

Evolution: it doesn’t provide the buttons too, but it tries to automatically detect paragraph directions and put correct HTML tags for it. Well, till now, it’s good. But it has another problem: I tell it to use UTF-8 encoding, but it doesn’t care! It encodes Persian characters using HTML unicode characters, which is not desirable as it increases the size of email considerably. I’ve filled a bug against it long ago, but there is no activity to solve it. Interesting!

KMail: Do not provide any kind of support for RTL languages AFAIK.

Well, it seems that I’ve not tried anything else! Do you know a good email client which supports RTL languages correctly?!

Installing Conexant full speed modem driver on Fedora 11

I found that some people have problem installing this driver on Fedora 11 (using available guidelines in Internet for Ubuntu), so I decided to try installing it on my system (which has a Conexant HSF modem chipset). I could install and use the driver successfully, but I think its license doesn’t allow me to distribute the final modified RPM package. So, I decided to create a simple shell script to create the package and put it here. (I wonder if we should put such documents inside Fedora wiki or not. Maybe I should communicate with Fedora Documentation people about it or read about contributing there?! Or maybe it is as easy as creating a new Wiki page there…)

Anyway, These are the steps to build a free full speed Conexant modem driver:

1. Download .tar.gz file of the free full speed driver release by dell from http://linux.dell.com/files/ubuntu/hardy/modem-drivers/hsf/ (Download this file for 64 bit Fedora systems(x86_64) and this one for 32 bit(Fedora-i386,i586 or i686) systems)

2. Download the latest modem driver from Linuxant (.tar.gz version). However notice that the following script is written for version 7.80.02.04, for later versions this script should be modified. So, to use this script without modification, you should download this file for 64bit Fedora and this one for 32 bit ones.

3. Download this script, put it beside those downloaded files and run the script  (If you run it as a regular user – which is recommended – you might need to run rpmdev-setuptree command first).

4. Now, you should be able to find the final RPM in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64 (or ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/i586).

5. If you have an HDA modem, you must install Linuxant alsa driver from http://www.linuxant.com/alsa-driver/

6. Now, you can install the generated rpm package. You might need to restart the system before using your modem. You can check your modem by running minicom to see if it can communicate with your modem.

Good luck!

RoboCup 2009 (Graz) and followups…

Hedayat in Graz

Hi all!

RoboCup 2009 competitions were held from June 29 to July 5 in Graz (Austria). After lots of problems, finally we were able to go there and participate in the competitions. That was interesting… but some terrible hardware and software problems happened for us (we had no problem with Fedora systems though!!! )

We were not good in the competitions at all. I’m not sure if we can (or want to!) participate in the next year’s competitions, but if so I hope that we can be much better. Anyway, it is finished now.

Graz is a nice beautiful city. Raining seems to be completely usual there; so it looks much different from dry cities in Iran. I really like it!

Since we were going to Europe, we had planned to visit Paris before returning back to home. After Graz, we went to Munich by train and spent 1 day there. We visited Dauthes Museum and then we went to English (or British?!) Garden. The latter was really beautiful (again, in contrast with dry cities of Iran).

And 1 day later, we were in Paris (we used train again). We spent 3 days in Paris visiting some famous locations and then took our plane to Iran. But it was not a direct flight, we should change our plane in Istanbul (Turkey). And so, we are here! (Istanbul) as we decided to spend 3 days in Istanbul. We arrived here yesterday night, and we will fly to Iran on July 13th. I hope that we can have good days here too. Wish luck for us!

P.S. 1: Europe countries are really expensive!

P.S. 2: It seems that people know Iran (at least they know the current president of Iran!!) much better than before! But unfortunately, it is because of recent (undesirable) events in Iran

Unrest in Iran… :(

Since the announcement of disputed Iran’s election results (This Saturday, 13th of January), some tragic events has occurred. At least one man has been killed today (there are some news reporting more in recent events), some students injured and hurt…
Just too bad… too annoying… I hope things get better soon

Fedora 11 Released! :) Jigdo shines again…this time with Presto!

Hi! Congratulations to everybody Fedora 11 is out. That’s good news, but not so much exciting for me, since I’m using it as its Preview edition came out. Anyway, it’s great to see it reaching the Final edition.

In brief, it is better than Fedora 10!! You can find more about it in it’s feature list or release notes. Some highlights: ext4 support, intel/ATI/nvidia KMS(Kernel Mode Setting), OpenOffice.org with improved Persian(Farsi) support, Firefox 3.5 (beta version, but works fine. supports HTML5 which has audio/video capabilities (built in player for the standard format)), more eclipse tools, netbeans 6.5 and official Presto support. As noted before, presto support is great and will reduce the download time for updates significantly.

Well, I’m using 64 bit edition of Fedora. But, I decided to get Fedora 11 final edition for both 64 and 32 bit systems. Since I favor jigdo for getting Fedora DVD images, I started to get the 64 bit edition with it. I had Fedora 11 x86_64 Preview DVD image, and also many updated packages in yum cache (/var/cache/yum) which were downloaded using presto. From 2872 packages, there was only near 400 packages missing, all other were in preview DVD or my update packages. That was great, jigdo got those missing packages and built my Fedora 11 DVD images. So, with the help of jigdo and presto, I was able to get my Fedora 11 DVD faster than ever!

Then, I decided to get the 32bit edition of Fedora 11 DVD (i586 edition this time, instead of i386 edition for previous releases). I used jigdo again, and good results: from more than 2700 packages, only 1000 packages were missing in my 64bit package collection. It means a great saving in download size again.

Jigdo is also a safe way do download a large file like DVD image, since it downloads the image file by file, and you won’t get a corrupted image file at the end (bittorent provides the same safety, but without that saving in the download size).

Have fun!