Блогчетање

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!

Yeah, we all know Shaun and Davyd, our famous maintainers of Yelp and Gnome Applets.

But, if you thought that their relationship ends with info-support in Yelp, random chats on IRC, e-mail discussions or whatever, you're wrong. I mean really, really wrong!

Just to give kudos to the new Fedora Serbian Translation team.

They already rock very hard, and I provided them with some webspace and mailing list.

Also, I turned comments off in my blog because of the big amount of spam (I don't want to spend my time on installing CAPTCHA and similar tests).

Mark: not using Gnome CVS is a big problem for translation, if I may say. I tried contacting Serbian AbiWord translator earlier, but never really got through.

Not surprisingly, AbiWord looks completely out of place on an otherwise fully Serbian Gnome desktop: it's written using Latin script instead of Cyrillic, it uses completely different menu names (though they're recognizable and often quite similar, they're still different!), and I simply can't get to learn enough about simply getting involved and I lack the time to chase Serbian AbiWord translator for too long.

AbiWord doesn't really fit: notice a pattern in other menus?

FWIW, this is not only a problem of AbiWord: Christian recently raised the same issue with Inkscape developers (yeah, they do have good practical reasons not to switch to Gnome CVS, but it always means a step back for translation users and contributors).

Best help you can get from Gnome Translation People (ok, it's officially "Project", not "People" :) is by using Gnome CVS!

Disclaimer: this doesn't mean that I don't appreciate what you're doing for helping AbiWord be as close as possible to what translators otherwise do, like using PO files, creating statistics such as this, etc. It's just that it's never good enough. Of course, feel free to ask me for help regarding those stats generation, I have done quite a bit on that front myself :)

I got back on Wednesday (sorry I didn't have a chance to say goodbye to everyone, since I left at around 4pm), had some stuff to do for my University professors (like give another talk as part of NCD Conference), and now I need to devote myself to preparing for a couple of exams (like Mathematical Analysis 2 and Compilers and Interpreters).

That means that my ToDo list will have to wait a bit (even if it has grown substantially during 6UADEC (like taking a look at Sun's improvements to Carlos' Language and Culture capplet, looking at their changes for supporting intltool-merge at install time, improving xml2po further, working on Evolution l10n stuff I discussed with the very pleasant Harish, etc.). I'm not out of my e-mail slump just yet, and I don't expect it to end before June times out, so bear with me, please.

GUADEC was very much fun to visit, and I'm sure coming again next year to, maybe, Barcelona :)—provided it doesn't fall on the same date as my exams do. Unfortunately, some of the guys I really looked forward to meeting didn't show up, like Carlos Perelló Marín, Jordi Mallach, or Dafydd Harries (I even spelled his name out correctly in my first attempt to find his page on Google :). Of course, I regret for everybody else who didn't show up, and thank to everyone else who did show up: very nice to meet you all guys!

Find Glynn! (Seth is my GUADEC talk hero)

I've finally put up all my photos (well, not all of them, I cut the airport crap out which is simply boring, and a couple of nice photos with a certain girl :) right here, so go find yourself there! Note that if you need full 2272×1704 versions, just strip the query string from the screen-sized versions.

Edit: because my server got overloaded with photo requests, I had to change configuration a bit: to get full images now, just strip the "cache/screen/" part from URLs.