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!