Query results: September, 2008

In two weeks, we will be holding a booth at the Paris Capitale du Libre event in the French capital. The conference attracts a crowd of 3000 —in spite or because of its assertive name— including a number of prominent players in the French and International freedomware scene.

The event will also see the announcement of the laureates of the Lutèce d’Or awards, in which we hope to qualify as the best project for promoting free software.

We won’t be giving a talk this time, but we’ll be very busy staffing the booth and looking for corporate sponsors. Our new T-shirt is already in the making, the printing shop reported, and should make its debut at the Paris event.

We’d be delighted to meet and talk to anyone who passes by (the entrance is costless, but registration is required). Particiipants and translators, if you happen to be there, please stop by and we’ll get you a drink!

Granted — it is all in French, it wasn’t national television, and it didn’t last long enough to cover many details. But it is all still worth boasting about: here are two minutes and fifty seconds of GNU/Linux Matters fame. During the RMLL 2008 in Mont-de-Marsan where we held a booth, a camera crew from FreeNewsTV, a French web TV channel, stopped by and interviewed the only one of us who spoke French.

(The video is a 26 MB Ogg file, viewable with VLC or any other decent video player.)

Given the hurried pace, the continuously moving camera, some disarming questions, and the speaker who consistently mis-pronounced every name he could read, it wasn’t such a bad performance after all. We’ll try hard to be interviewed in English, next time.

Today we are extremely happy to release HonaLinux.org, Pereidinalinux.org, DungLinux.org, and OtrymayLinux.org, which are written in Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese and Ukrainian respectively. These four new translations of our flagship website GetGNULinux.org are a great reason to rejoice, for many reasons.

The first reason is obviously that we grow in our capacity to reach out to everyday users and provide them with prime-quality web material about GNU/Linux and freedomware.
More specifically, we are able to enter a part of the web where information about the free software world is relatively scarce. We hope to be all the more effective in fostering Linux usage in these languages.

Another great reason to rejoice is that this release marks the completion of our translation system. From the first words down to the last localized URL, these four websites have been translated, built, checked, and published with a web browser only. The ease and maturity of the process —even right-to-left languages are displayed faultessly, as honalinux.org testifies— makes us proud.

The translations are a trimmed edition of GetGNULinux.org, containing less pages and thus allowing an earlier release while the full edition is being translated. This method allows us to grow at a much faster pace and we shall be making use of it again soon. A few people deserve great credit for this release:

• Most of the credit for DungLinux.org goes to Clytie Siddall, from the Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team. Clytie, a familiar figure among internationalized free software project communities, simply stunned us with the efficiency and speed at which she worked through the translation. Many thanks also go to Minh Ngoc Le for his patient help and participation.
• The bulk of both OtrymayLinux.org and PereidinaLinux.org was built by V’yacheslav Stetskevych — who didn’t give up despite the fact that we (still) cannot differentiate written Russian from Ukraininan.
• Hassan Ibraheem took most of HonaLinux.org upon him, while we learned to write websites to suit his beautiful language (written and read from right to left!). A friendly wave also goes to Farid Fakhreddia for his encouragement and advice.

A press release (also translated in Russian, Vietnamese, Castilian (Spanish), and French) has been issued on this opportunity.