From locales በ geez.org Sat Dec 2 13:01:27 2006 From: locales በ geez.org (Daniel Yacob) Date: Sat Dec 2 13:01:29 2006 Subject: [am-l10n] OLPC Presentation Comments Message-ID: Greetings All, I've been late to send a small report on the One Laptop Per Child programme after hearing a presentation by Nicholas Negroponte (head of the project) two weeks ago. In the presentation Negroponte passed around the working model of the laptop, the production models had just arrived to the US that same day and even he had not seen them yet. They are produced on the same assembly lines used to make Dell another 1st class laptops. The price right now for the laptops is (I think) $148 dollars each. The idea of a $100 laptop is a misconception of the press. My 2008 the price should come down to $100, and maybe to $50 by 2010. The laptop first looks like a toy, it is very small and light, for a child's hands I guess it is the right size. The keyboard has no "CapsLk" key, he made a joke on how no language in the world needs a CapsLk, so they put a control key there. It has foldable antennas to help with wireless networking, the interface is built around the idea of being in a wireless neighborhood, so it is assumed that children will be actively exchanging information. The interface is based on Linux Fedora. It does not have a "crank" to manually generate electricity. I think he said that it does (or will) have an inertial recharger, so that while kids walk to school and back that motion recharges the battery (some watches do this). The monitor can fold around into different positions, in one form it looks like it is a video game player. Some other interesting notes was that where they've tested the laptops, it turns out that parents end up using the laptop's 1/3 of the time. It has changed some family dynamics because the adults have to get help from the children, so they start to respect their children more. He says that he hears many times a parent say that they have "become friends" with their children. They have some future plans such as to make special analog peripherals for things like testing water quality. They are presently in discussion to introduce the OLPC program to Ethiopia. A government has to have $200 million available to participate. This is larger than the national budgets of some countries. In South America, some countries have joined together to come up with the $200 million. Their policy is that when the laptops are distributed to a country, the interface MUST be in the local language. So if Ethiopia gets into the program, there will be lots of Amharic computers everywhere. I don't know if they support only the national language or every language of a country. It would be interesting to investigate their special version of Fedora and look into what needs localizing. cheers, /Daniel From locales በ geez.org Sat Dec 2 13:03:49 2006 From: locales በ geez.org (Daniel Yacob) Date: Sat Dec 2 13:03:50 2006 Subject: [am-l10n] OOo+Ubuntu L10n Kit Message-ID: Greetings, I've been working on an OpenOffice.Org 2.x development kit for Ubuntu 6.10. The purpose of the kit is that it has on 1 cd everything you need to compile and localize OpenOffice.Org, no internet connection or additional downloads are necessary. This is to help parties in Ethiopia undertake translation and other localization work on OOo more easily. Unfortunately, OOo has to be recompiled every time to make use of new translations. OOo is also the most demanding software I've ever encountered in 15+ years for compilation. The setup is made to be as simple as it possible so people can get right to work and not fight the system for weeks on end. I'll look into providing an ISO image for people who want to try it, I'm not sure if that's going to happen unless I can find a site that can handle the bandwidth. If anyone would like a copy of the CD, please just send me your land mail address offline and I will send to you. If you are in Ethiopia I'll also include the Ubuntu 6.10 CD. cheers, /Daniel