Its always been a dream to have a full working OS/GUI which is localized for us. Many times a lot of people challenged that on me, stating that this was no use. Maybe so, my whole point was getting it done, so I did not care much about those comments. It was not that I was looking to sell that work or create a business case out of it, so who cares. I don't know for what reason maybe the kick of doing it; what ever. With this I did some work till end of 2006. Always the work was slow due to various reasons; now the main factor being I am too occupied with other work and party have lost interest.
The whole point of this post is to get the interest back to people who might want to start off with something alike. Maybe guys who have the same kind of interest as me and others. Thaana fonts are already working for most OS's and web browsers. We can word process, make web sites, etc.. but should this be the end of it? I think not. We should move on and do more.
Linux is one good platform for this; the open nature of Linux enables us to implement these features in the OS easily. Bangladesh recently launched their version of Ubuntu; why can't we? I don't see a reason why it can't be done.
Few things to think about and do are.. implementing the locale on Linux; this is easy job; partly I have done some work as well.. here is the link on mlug. Then comes the translation projects, which again is easy; but need a good translation team. So far the most successful projects on localization been the wikipedia project (even thought its a web based project its a great job by the team who is involved).
I hope some people will restart work on localization for Linux.
The whole point of this post is to get the interest back to people who might want to start off with something alike. Maybe guys who have the same kind of interest as me and others. Thaana fonts are already working for most OS's and web browsers. We can word process, make web sites, etc.. but should this be the end of it? I think not. We should move on and do more.
Linux is one good platform for this; the open nature of Linux enables us to implement these features in the OS easily. Bangladesh recently launched their version of Ubuntu; why can't we? I don't see a reason why it can't be done.
Few things to think about and do are.. implementing the locale on Linux; this is easy job; partly I have done some work as well.. here is the link on mlug. Then comes the translation projects, which again is easy; but need a good translation team. So far the most successful projects on localization been the wikipedia project (even thought its a web based project its a great job by the team who is involved).
I hope some people will restart work on localization for Linux.
hathiyaaru / ... hehe i like that.
Nice work!!!!
By GUI, are you referring to Gnome WM ? So how do we get involved?
@i .. well there are many ways. you can choose to be part of gnome translation project (we have a dhivehi port of it) or KDE and others. Other option is if you use Ubuntu try https://launchpad.net/%7Eubuntu-l10n-dv that's one of the best ways.
personally I think that we at least need to work on a common framework for frequently used names like "file" and "tools" that don't sound completely ridiculous. I translated the Zekr program about 85% of the way through but couldn't figure out adequate substitutions in dhivehi. The project was lost...
SoE: I agree with you completely. In fact, consistency is one of the key paradigms of the design guidelines for the GNOME desktop (but not necessarily, for KDE).
I bet if someone like soadhube were here, he would oppose using something like 'ކޮޕީ' instead of 'ނަކަލް ކުރޭ' - the former, which I am sure sounds more familiar and renders itself more comprehensible to most Malivian PC users than the possibly syntactically correct alternative.
Whatever the case is, I suggest we begin with translating a cross-platform application most Maldivians use both on *nix and windows - I want to nominate firefox (sofwath et. al are members of the ubuntu-i18n team, so they should already know about the 50 odd suggestions I've made on launchpad->ubuntu->firefox3).
The net-effect is, FF3 will be available for download in our own language and more volunteers might crop up to help with the gnome/ubuntu translation effort.