Some very cool things happening for local Gnome users. A certain
Serbian company, has become a Novell partner for Serbian market.
What they're interested in is getting a fully localised system to be
able to offer it to government institutions and everybody else.
Novell is willing to sponsor getting such a system.
They somehow got to me, and asked me if I'd like to help with
that (to try to actually involve everybody who's already into it in
Serbia). Of course, I was very much interested.
The catch is that they want a fully capable small business system,
and are doing this with next release of SuSE in mind (of course, they
care about enterprise uses, so NLD is also in consideration, but SuSE,
due in September, is the first step): which means that the work will
need to be carried out until end of July. Unfortunately, I was not
able to find anything about what software is included in next SuSE
release (I tried developer.novell.com and
googling around), and I was quick to realise why is closed development
not such a great thing.
Since they're letting me estimate the workload and see if this is
doable, you can guess that "supported" Serbian desktop is going to be
based on Gnome, and I'm very strongly
considering pushing Gnome
Office as a default office package. If only Criawips was actually
useful (hey Herzi,
I promise to resolve bug
#172459 by end of June so you can go ahead and work on Criawips
:), Gnome Office would definitely be a default (even with AbiWord
translation problems I mentioned before: I'd simply fork the
translation to make it consistent). This way, it depends on our
ability to actually finish up OpenOffice.org translation in time.
There are many things that need to be done, but they're so hard
to do with their process being so closed. This includes things like
fonts (they're still buggy in everything except Debian I think),
keyboard layouts, locales, spell-checking with aspell and OOo, PDF viewing (things like
search should "Just Work" for Serbian texts, as far as technically
possible [I know that one can make completely unsearchable texts as
PDFs], but I doubt that evince is coming there), proof-reading all
translations, documentation, etc.
So, if you have already worked in Serbian l10n field for free
software systems, feel free to contact me at 063 8626 082 or danilo@gnome.org by
this Thursday evening. I'll contact several people I have in
mind myself, but don't let that stop you helping us and helping
yourself!