vimov is sponsoring the first Installfest in Alexandria on Monday, March 9th, 2009. The one day event, which is hosted by ITI and organized by EGLUG, is the sixth community-driven event to spread the word on GNU/Linux and Open Source in Egypt, and the first to be organized in Alexandria.

While in the past few years, adoption of GNU/Linux has been increasing rapidly, whether it would be in poor or large countries, small businesses or large enterprises, its market share in Egypt has not picked up. It thus remains up to the community to try to pass the word around on the benefits of Open Source software and technologies, and how Free and Open Source Software can help decrease costs at homes and businesses, increase efficiency and productiveness, and most importantly, reduce the reliance on proprietary technologies.

At the event, you can bring your desktop or laptop and get professional help from the most skilled geeks in Egypt on how to install a Linux distribution; setup the driver for a card you cannot get to work; or have any of your GNU/Linux questions answered. Additionally, many sessions will be held during the day that go from introductory basics like installing software to advanced topics like kernel programming and MySQL scalability.

The schedule of the day’s sessions is available at EGLUG’s wiki.

Aviate Front is a GUI front-end for Aviate, which runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Aviate Front allows you to easily create Deployment Files for your web applications using drag-and-drop of the various components supported by Aviate.

Still under development, it is quickly taking its shape, and most of the core functionality works. Below is a screenshot, and if you want to take a deeper look, the manual has instructions for compiling the source.

Aviate Front is developed in C++ using Qt.

The first release of Aviate has hit the runway.

Commonly, it has been that the more complicated a web application one develops is, or so it becomes throughout development, the more tedious and time-consuming the deployment process becomes. Unless one would automate the process by writing deployment scripts, he is bound to making mistakes, or having the web application down for too long due to making mistakes in the deployment, forgetting steps, or doing steps in an incorrect order.

Aviate was developed to make deploying web applications easier, by employing an easy-to-write XML file format that describes your deployment process. Whether it is copying files, decompressing archives, updating a database, synchronizing a directory, checking out from a version control system, or other actions, with Aviate you can make these actions through very simple to use XML tags.

It does not stop here though. Aviate was designed to be cross-platform, so it would become accessible to all developers, and it was designed to be highly extensible, so you can extend its features with ones you need but have not been yet implemented in Aviate. It is not for a specific language; whether your application is in PHP or in Ruby, you can write deployment scripts for it. Additionally, and soon, very soon, we’d be releasing a GUI front-end for Aviate that would allow developers to create deployment files by an intuitive drag and drop interface, thus making writing an XML file a history.

We have an extensive roadmap for Aviate. We hope the open source community would find it as valuable tool as we found it to be during our using it.

Have a taste of what Aviate can do by taking a look at an example deployment file.

We will keep this place up-to-date with the most recent news from vimov, new products, and all the cool stuff we are doing and we believe others would like to tap into.