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News and Editorials
Localization under a government umbrella
In an era of wider governmental adoption of free software, the Serbian authorities decided to take a different approach toward the affirmation of GNU/Linux and free software in the business sector and the general public. Instead of direct adoption of free software and open standards, Serbian authorities decided to fund several localization projects with the goal of helping to improve the competitiveness of free software on the Serbian IT market.The first information about the government's plans to help the localization of Free Software appeared in December 2007, when several of the Serbian media reported about the issue. Shortly after the news was revealed, the official press release (Google cached page, since the site was changed with no resources in English at the moment) from the Serbian Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society was published, giving all the details that were available to the public at the moment.
In short, February was set as a deadline for the first results, which meant localized versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org. The projects were funded by the ministry and delegated to the several Serbian computer science faculties for organization and implementation. All of them, except the Ubuntu localization team, showed their first results in March at a presentation organized by the ministry. Ubuntu was late since the localized version was planned for the LTS (Long term support) release which came out in April. Shortly after Ubuntu 8.04 was released localized Ubuntu ISOs appeared on project servers.
Ubuntu was known as a distribution which didn't have a localized installer
or characteristic Ubuntu software translated in Serbian. In order to
provide better localization, people from Faculty of Electrical engineering
in Belgrade forked Ubuntu and named the new distribution
cp6Linux. Cp6Linux was recognized as
symbolic way to write "SerbLinux" since cp6 can be understood as "Serb" in
something that might be considered as Cyrillic "leatspeak". The
development team never confirmed this though. "Linux for human
beings who speak (only) Serbian
" is packaged in three flavors: Home,
School and Business. Beside this way of packaging, the cp6 development
team customized visual identity and adopted a user interface to make it
more friendly for users coming from Windows.
The most important task and the purpose of cp6's existence is not entirely completed, but the situation compared to a vanilla Ubuntu installation is a lot better. The live disk bootstrap interface and the live system installer are translated into Serbian. System tools and package managers are also localized, but translations of package descriptions and configuration messages are missing. The graphical configuration tools shipped with Ubuntu, like restricted-manager, are translated too, so it seems that cp6 2008 (which is the first and so far the only version) is basically targeting localization of the GUI applications and tools. The cp6 team produced a 52-page Creative Commons licensed User manual (CC-NC-SA), covering the most important features in using and installing cp6Linux 2008.
The Fedora localization team (Google translation) took different strategy and decided to produce localized flavors of Fedora, with no forks and branding. The Serbian Fedora localization community was quite well organized and productive before, so the first thing that people for Faculty of Organization Sciences in Belgrade did was getting in touch with translators who already worked on Fedora. According to them, 19416 of 32480 strings in total were localized already, and they've localized 98% of 19500 unlocalized strings, which leads us to the total score of 99% localized strings.
Almost 100% of localization strings in real life mean localized configuration tools, package management GUIs and installation interface. YUM and package descriptions, similar to cp6Linux, remain untranslated. Most of the work was done on Fedora 8, which is available for download from project servers, with Serbian localization and settings out of the box. There is no information about ISOs or localization details for Fedora 9 or 10 on the project website.
Mozilla products were localized by the people from Electronic Faculty in Niš. As in the case of Fedora, project organizations continued existing efforts. The final result, for GNU/Linux and Windows, are Cyrillic and Latin versions available for download from the project website (Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.9).
Back in Belgrade, localization of OpenOffice.org was delegated to The Faculty of Mathematics. Again, the project continued existing efforts and took over the coordination of the official Serbian translation team. The first steps toward a localized OpenOffice.org dated back to 2001 when a group of Serbian free software users got together for a big translation marathon organized by ICT Tower, a local OSS oriented software company. Sadly, without any external support, they failed to keep interest in the project and translations were never updated. The second big push was in the summer of 2005 when Novell gave some money to the "prevod.org" group for improving Serbian localization in SUSE. Following the OpenOffice release 2 "prevod.org" members returned to keeping up with GNOME translations, and once again the OpenOffice.org translation was left unmaintained.
"In December 2008 the Ministry of telecommunications and information
society Republic of Serbia started four projects for free software
localization.
" explains Goran Rakic, Serbian OpenOffice.org native
language project lead. According to Rakic, the biggest achievements of the
project are localized releases of 2.4, 2.4.1 and 3.0 with
continuity. "We did large QA and localization quality is better then
ever
", he states. Project statistics show distribution of more than
30,000 localized installations via the project site and more than 3000 in
just one week after the 3.0 release. Rakic reveals that localized OOo is
used inside government too, with some large deployments and many more to
go. Rakic looks into the future saying that the "Ministry and Faculty
of Mathematics in Belgrade signed contract for three years with option to
extend and we are just one year in it. I can say that future looks bright
for all current and new OpenOffice.org users in Serbia.
"
It is very hard to give a general conclusion about the implementation and impact of these projects. First of all, the public was never informed of any study related to the use of localized versions of any software in Serbia. So it's impossible to predict how many users might directly benefit from those activities. The only numbers that we can use for any sort of analysis are download statistics, which doesn't necessarily reflect the real amount of acceptance or everyday use of localized programs and distributions.
Contributions and translations from the Faculty of Organization Sciences have gone upstream, and cooperation with the Fedora translation team seems to be established and functioning according to the information on the Serbian team page. On the contrary, it seems that the Cp6Linux translations didn't go upstream, since there are no noted contributions on Launchpad. As in the case of Fedora, communication and cooperation is managed on the Serbian Mozilla localization team wiki. OpenOffice is the only project that actually took over coordination of the localization team, at least officially. Speaking of distributions, in both cases GNOME is being used as the default desktop environment, which has a strong and devoted localization community whose work was packaged in cp6Linux and Fedora in Serbian. GNOME translation is not a part of government funded activities, though.
In the meantime, the Faculty of Technical Sciences from Novi Sad started to work on Alfresco localization, and the results are available on the Alfresco Forge page.
This non-typical approach to free software from the government was motivated by the expectation that localization will become another recommendation for the Free Software adoption in Serbia. According to Mr. Nebojša Vasiljevic, assistant of the Minister of Telecommunications and Information Society for Information society, in his interview for GNUzilla magazine (issue 36). He also said that those project are not part of any strategy involving switching to free software in governmental institutions.
New Releases
Slackware 12.2 has been announced
Version 12.2 of Slackware has been announced. "Among the many program updates and distribution enhancements, you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.4.3, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 3.5.10, the final 3.x version of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. We have added to Slackware support for HAL (the Hardware Abstraction Layer) which allows the system administrator to add users to the cdrom and plugdev groups." (Thanks to Alan Hicks).
Linux Mint 6 "Felicia" released
The Linux Mint team has announced the release of v6 "Felicia". "Congratulations and thanks to all the people who contributed to this release, to all the translators, to the upstream developers and projects which made this possible and above all to the development team for their continuous support." Linux Mint is a fork of Ubuntu.
Announcing Omega 10
Omega 10 is a Fedora Remix in an installable live CD format. "It is a installable Live CD for regular PC (i686 architecture) systems. It has all the features of Fedora 10 and a number of additional multimedia players and codecs. You can play any multimedia including MP3 music or commercial DVD's out of the box."
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
Release Update: d-i RC2 and deep freeze; handling of remaining RC bugs; *-reports and release notes
The Debian release team has an update on Debian 5.0 lenny. A second release candidate for the lenny installer is available for testing. "Currently, the only extra piece we need to declare the Lenny puzzle ready is a final version of the installer. The -boot people are about to deliver a second release candidate, which will be final unless something critical pops up."
Official results for Project membership procedures
The Debian project had a vote recently looking at a change in membership procedures. The project voted for further discussion. Click below for the bloody details of the vote.
Fedora
Instructions from Fedora on fixing the dbus problem
Some Fedora 10 users have come to understand very well the problems that resulted from the recent, ill-advised dbus update. For those who are trying to repair their systems, the project has published a recipe for getting around the problem - it comes down to running "yum update" in a terminal window. "Using our open mailing lists, the community is currently discussing ways to improve Fedora's update processes, to minimize the chances of this sort of situation recurring."
Fedora Outage Notification: Koji, Wiki, Smolt, Transifex
Fedora has an unplanned outage which began at 2008-12-16 08:10 UTC. There is currently no ETA for resolving the issues which are disk related. Services affected are Koji, Wiki, Smolt and Transifex.
SUSE Linux and openSUSE
Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 11.1: Improved Installation, Easier Administration
openSUSE 11.1 is due to be released December 18th. Here are sneak peeks at openSUSE 11.1. "openSUSE's installation has long been regarded as one of the best in the Linux world. Never before has that compliment been more accurate than in openSUSE 11.1. We started by building on the great base built in openSUSE 11.0 this past summer: a sleek new look, and a simpler installation process."
Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 11.1: The Latest GNOME Desktop
In the continuing series of Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 11.1, is this introduction to the newest version of the GNOME desktop into openSUSE. "openSUSE 11.1 will contain the latest version of the GNOME desktop, GNOME 2.24. Not only does this new version bring with it great new features, but as always the GNOME developers in the openSUSE Project have added our own unique polish to make a truly unique, polished desktop experience."
openSUSE 10.2 has reached End of Life
openSUSE 10.2 has reached its End of Life with a squirrelmail update. openSUSE 10.2 was released on December 7 2006.Discussing openSUSE 11.2 schedule
With the release of openSUSE 11.1, it's time to discuss the schedule for openSUSE 11.2. "One of the things that we want to do as a project is to have more community involvement in major decisions, like the release schedule. Right now, we're discussing the proposed 11.2 release schedule on the openSUSE-Project mailing list. Yes, 11.1 is not out the door yet, and we're already talking about the 11.2 release."
New Distributions
cp6Linux
As mentioned in today's feature article, cp6Linux or SerbLinux is a fork of Ubuntu localized into Serbian. "Linux for human beings who speak (only) Serbian" is packaged in three flavors: Home, School and Business. cp6 has been added to the Country-specific: Serbia section of the list.Hackable:1 - a new distribution for mobile devices
The second version of Hackable:1, a distribution for the OpenMoko Neo and other mobile devices, has been released. "The important part is that hackable:1 is not only open to community contributions but we are actively encouraging them and we do the full development in public on IRC channels and mailing lists - no decisions behind closed doors, no sudden changes of directions. We want to produce a stable, linearly evoluting platform."
TurnKey Linux for software appliances
TurnKey Linux. provides a variety of software appliances, currently as an ISO image, of integrated systems, built on an Ubuntu 8.04.1 base. "TurnKey Linux, a new opensource project that develops a family of lightweight installable live CDs optimized for various server-type tasks including LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Joomla, Drupal, MediaWiki, and others." TurnKey PostgreSQL was recently released as an installable live CD that can run of real hardware or most types of virtual machines.
Distribution Newsletters
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #121
The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for December 13, 2008 covers: 4,000 people attend Ubuntu-fr Release Party, Ubuntu Developer Summit: Jaunty, Hall of Fame: Albero Milone, Interview with (huats), Leader of the Ubuntu-fr Team, MOTU, New York team Asterisk demonstration, Software Freedom Day Nicaragua, Launchpad Drupal modules, Launchpad in twitter and identi.ca, Launchpad off-line Dec. 17th, OpenSolaris tackles Ubuntu dominance, and much more.The Mint Newsletter - issue 69
This issue of The Mint Newsletter looks at the final release of Felicia and several other topics.openSUSE Weekly News, Issue 50
This issue for the openSUSE Weekly News contains: Pre-order openSUSE 11.1, Wanted: Tester from SUSE Studio, Password Protect for GRUB, KDE4-Repository changes, and SELinux in openSUSE 11.1. Click below for links to several translations.Fedora Weekly News # 156
The December 15th issues of the Fedora Weekly news is out. "This week's issue features an exciting discount for Fedora community members in Australia and New Zealand on Red Hat certification training and exams. Coverage of Fedora Planet includes event reports from a FOSS event in India and a Parisian Fedora install fest, along with a nifty XO Exchange Registry. Another flamewar eruption is covered on the Developments beat, along with updates on the D-Bus in Fedora and discussion on making 'updates-testing' more useful. Fedora websites are now available in Russian and Bulgarian, as reported in this issue's Translations beat. The Artwork beat reports on the Fedora Art Team's re-envisioning discussion as well as using the Fedora branding in the OLPC Sugar interface. The security advisory beat updates us on Fedora 9 and 10 updates, along with reminders of Fedora 8 end of life, January 7, 2009. In virtualization news, details of the latest libvert in RHEL and CentOS 5.2. All this and more in this week's FWN!"
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 282
The DistroWatch Weekly for December 15, 2008 is out. "This week's feature article shows keen Linux users how to make the most of their computer by performing a custom install for a leaner and faster system - in this case we build a custom Ubuntu 8.10. In the news section, openSUSE prepares for the imminent release of version 11.1, Debian announces the upcoming second and final release candidate of the Debian installer, the Unofficial Fedora FAQ updates its HOWTOs for the recently released Fedora 10, the University of Glasgow settles on Slackware Linux for its log-in server, Spain's Trisquel is added to GNU's free distribution list, and Chile's Educalibre gets Tuquito Linux running on Intel Classmate netbooks. We also have links to two interesting interviews - one with Timothy Cramer from OpenSolaris and the other with Warren Woodford of MEPIS Linux. Finally, if you are still searching for that elusive minimalist Linux system that would run smoothly on any old computer, take a look at Tiny Core Linux - a desktop distro in 11 MB. Happy reading!"
Distribution meetings
Second call for talks for the Debian Developers' room at FOSDEM 2009
There is a call for talks in the Debian Developers' room at FOSDEM 2009. "If you're interested in holding a talk, but are not sure yet whether you can make it interesting, or don't yet know whether you'll be able to make it to FOSDEM, it would still be interesting if you'd let me know sooner rather than later, so that I know what might be coming."
Newsletters and articles of interest
Screencast: How to Build a Fedora 10 Remix (Montana Linux)
Scott Dowdle has a two-part screencast over at Montana Linux that shows how to build a remix of Fedora 10, along with reasons why you might want to. "The Fedora folks usually fill up a single CD but how about a LiveDVD with additional desktop environments, a slew of window managers, a ton of application software, and multimedia apps that Fedora won't include in the distro? That's what I make during the screencast... a custom LiveDVD with all of the updates applied and all of the additional software I want in a LiveDVD with a painless, quick install-to-hard-drive if desired." The videos are available in both Flash and Ogg Theora formats.
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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