Arabeyes celebrates third anniversary with IRC ‘evolution’ party

The date is 7/29, 1200 – 2359 UTC. The place is irc.freenode.net, #arabeyes. Arabeyes is self-described as “a Meta project that is aimed at fully supporting the Arabic language in the Unix/Linux environment.” Since Arabeyes began, there have been several Arabic Linux distributions released, KDE has become usable in Arabic, plenty of work has been done on Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, and Linux has started to become recognized as a useful operating system in Arabic-speaking countries, at least among the geek-cognoscenti crowd. This year’s IRC event celebrates all this. 17 guest “speakers” are scheduled, and you may want to drop in and meet one or more of them even if you don’t speak Arabic; Linux and open source transcend linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries, and it’s good to support advocacy efforts no matter what language or country they’re in.This is the event/guest schedule, subject to last-minute change and modification:

12:00 – 12:30 Free Form (Arabeyes.org and the future)
12:30 – 13:00 Pablo Saratxaga (Mandrake)
13:00 – 13:30 Mostafa/Alaa (Egypt LUG)
13:30 – 14:00 Mohammed Yousif (Arabeyes – Quran/Unicode)
14:00 – 14:30 Lars Knoll (Trolltech/QT)
14:30 – 15:00 Mohammed Elzubeir (Arabeyes – Duali)
15:00 – 15:30 –Free Form (break)–
15:30 – 16:00 Mohammed Sameer (Arabeyes – Katoob)
16:00 – 16:30 *Yousef Raffa (Saudi LUG)
16:30 – 17:00 Carlos Perello Marin (Gnome)
17:00 – 17:30 Youcef Rabah Rahal (Arabeyes – Bayani)
17:30 – 18:00 Shachar Shemesh (Wine)
18:00 – 18:30 –Free Form (break)–
18:30 – 19:00 Jad Saklawi (Lebanon LUG)
19:00 – 19:30 Pavel Janik/Eike Rathke(OpenOffice.org)
19:30 – 20:00 Owen Taylor (Pango)
20:00 – 20:30 Arafat Medini (Arabeyes – GnomeTranslation)
20:30 – 21:00
21:00 – 21:30 –Free Form (break)–
21:30 – 22:00 Ahmad Khalifa (Arabeyes – PuTTY/MiniBidi/CUPS)
22:00 – 22:30 Steve Langasek (Debian-boot)
22:30 – 23:00
23:00 – 23:30 *Anmar Oueja (Arabeyes – Arabbix)
23:30 – 00:00 Free Form (Final thoughts)

Arabeyes has released or helped with many projects that are bringing Linux and open source to the Arabic world. Today’s IRC get-together is a celebration of these successes that will hopefully spur more of them in the future.

Since English is still the most widely-used language in computing, and some of the IRC session’s invited guests are not Arabic speakers, the primary channel language (at least for today) is English.

NewsForge published an edited log of last year’s Arabeyes anniversary IRC event. This year we’re telling you about it while it’s going on so you can log on and say “Hi” in person.

We’ll update this story with a link to the “official” Arabeyes IRC log after it gets posted.