2004.06_Speaking Hindi, Akademy, Slack Party.pdf

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Hindi is the Language of the Tux

In his now famous piece on Slashdot

entitled “Why Linux Makes Sense for

India”, Professor Venkatesh (Venky) Har-

iharan argued that “the localization of

Linux to Indian languages can spark off

a revolution that reaches down to the

grassroots levels of the country”. This

simple statement was the inspiration

behind setting up IndLinux – The Indian

Linux Project with initial funding from

Netcore and a handful of volunteers.

Addressing the need for localized soft-

ware and interfaces, the project aims to

build a fully Indian language enabled dis-

tro, with focus on ease of use and

functionality. With a small team of dedi-

cated volunteers, the project has come a

long way. So far it has managed to com-

plete 80 percent of KDE 3.2, 20 percent of

GNOME and 100 percent of Xfce string

translations. Furthermore it has released

in the public domain localized applica-

tion sets based on GNOME and KDE, Xfce

desktops in Hindi as well as a bootable

LiveCD with Indian language interface.

Deployment efforts primarily center

around the personal desktop or

community kiosk. The initial aim

is to provide a functional and local-

ized computing experience which

enables the end-user to learn and

reskill.

The project has seen a constant

turnaround in the number of volunteers

with quite a few choosing to stay on

throughout the lifetime. Translators and

language experts as well as people

skilled in C/C++, Python, Perl and shell

scripting are always welcome to join it.

The hurdles IndLinux faces are similar

to other localization projects. These

include the small number of volunteers,

coordination issues, font and other tech-

nical issues. For Hindi in particular, lack

of standardized terminology is an issue,

which however has been addressed by

creating its own set of jargon.

IndLinux plans to initiate a Hindi

translation project, which would derive

from GNOME-KDE Hindi work done so

far. The aim is to have a large team of

translators who can work on technical

and general translations including user

documentation.

Further down the line there are plans

to integrate content development tools

for anyone to develop Indian language

content rapidly.

The project is also involved in team

formation and initial support for

Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and Telugu

localization initiatives – the Indian sub-

continent is rich in languages spoken by

millions of people.

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http://www.indlinux.org/

http://www.indlinux.org/hindi/gnome/

gnome24.html

http://www.indlinux.org/hindi/kde/

gallery/

Free Code from Africa

Africa Source, the first pan-African meet-

ing of free and Open Source software

developers, drew together over 60 people

from 25 countries (including nearly 20

African countries such as Benin, Tanza-

nia, Cameroon, Ethiopia, just to name a

few). Coming from the commercial, aca-

demic and non-profit sectors, the

spectrum of participants ranged from

advanced programmers to those with

basic skills in LAMP (Linux, Apache,

MySQL, and PHP).

The five day developer workshop,

organized by Amsterdam-based NGO

Tactical Technology Collective took

place in Okahanja, Namibia March 15

to 19. Its aim was to build a network

of OSS developers across the conti-

nent, to facilitate cooperation,

improve education and aid NGOs by

sharing experiences and skills.

Accompanied by African food (braai

food), aboriginal African dance and

music, the participants were totally

immersed in mutual learning.

Hence participant and GStreamer

developer Andy Wingo felt “wonderful

to meet other hackers of the continent,

and especially seeing quality home-

grown hackers working on home-grown

solutions”. He was particularly im-

pressed by Guido Sohne and organizers

like Joris Komen from SchoolNet

Namibia. “They do hard, enthusiastic

work towards equalizing the social prob-

lems that prevent the development of

good hackers.” Neil Blakey-Milner of

South Africa was delighted to see that

many people found learning about blog-

ging and Zope was the best thing they’d

learned in the past week.

An NGO-in-a-box, a set of CDs for peo-

ple trying to convince non-governmental

organizations to use Open Source,

should be a great help in improving the

situation for better learning, cooperating,

and coding. At the end of the event, each

participant was given a copy. However,

Africa still suffers from fundamental

problems such as a lack of computers,

and expensive bandwidth.

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http://www.tacticaltech.org/

http://www.advogato.org/person/wingo/

http://www.ryze.com/go/wgsohne

http://www.schoolnet.na/

http://mithrandr.moria.org/

June 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

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World

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A Summit for All

Following up from the “KDE

Contributor Conference” in

August 2003, the KDE pro-

ject moves on to higher

grounds, inviting all and

sundry to the “KDE Community

World Summit 2004”, codenamed

“aKademy”. The event will be held in

Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, Germany,

August 21 to 29, 2004.

The new name is only one of the mea-

sures taken to make the event more

attractive, not only to KDE programmers,

but to contributors and users in general.

Although it’s 2003 predecessor “Kastle”,

held in Nové Hrady, in the Czech Repub-

lic (see Issue 36, p86) was dubbed a

“contributor conference” to emphasize

the fact that technical writers, translators,

promoters, artists and other non-coding

KDE developers were equally important

to the success of the software, and

equally welcome, only a few non-pro-

grammers attended. The 2004 event is

looking to change this, and the agenda

reflects the event’s focus.

It starts with a “KDE

Developers’ and Contribu-

tors’ Conference”, August

21 to 22, and ends with a

“Users’ Conference”, August 28

to 29. On the days in between, program-

mers are invited to join the “KDE

Improvement Coding Marathon, while

admins and users can spend their time

enhancing their skills in tutorials. Pro-

posals for conference talks and tutorials

should be sent to cfp2004@kde.org . The

conference language is English. Partici-

pants and volunteers are invited to join

the mailing list, kde-conference@kde.org .

Parallel to the event, the “First Interna-

tional Software Freedom Day” will be

held at the same location, a film acad-

emy, August 28, and all attendees are

welcome to celebrate the freedom of

software with a big party.

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http://conference2004.kde.org/

https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/

kde-conference

http://www.filmakademie.de/

index_html?set_language=en

http://softwarefreedomday.org/

Slack Party 2004

In mid-March, Taiwan was completely

caught up in the presidential election

fever. But there were a few exceptions.

On March 14, a largish group of Tai-

wanese Slackware users gathered at the

country’s first Slackware user meeting,

determined to create a social network

around their favorite distribution.

The participants reported on their

experiences with jmcce (a program used

for Chinese text on the Linux console),

the “Open Type Font Organizer” oto ,

installation, how to build a server, as

well as Linux application development

and the career of Linux programmers.

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http://slackware.org.tw/

www.linux-magazine.com

June 2004

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