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…