Re: Skolelinux (educational distro)

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry dot com> wrote:
> [Abdulaziz Al-Arfaj]
> > Once it is confirmed that Skolelinux will be able to support Arabic
> > properly, I will very much be in favour of starting a Skolelinux
> > translation project here.

Abdulaziz by all means :-)  Do please make sure to upload the files onto
Arabeyes' CVS (ie. make sure to do things the "normal" way we've been
doing things).

> At the moment the stable version of Debian Edu is based on
> Debian/Woody, and we are working on a Sarge based future version.  If
> it is little work to get the Woody based version to support Arabic, we
> can do that, but I suspect it is better to spend the time on the Sarge
> version, as there seem to be lots of missing pieces in Woody.

Yeah, it might be wise simply to forget about woody.

> > And if no one else sticks his neck out, I would very much like to
> > be maintainer of said project, if core approves :)
> 
> Some information is available from
> <URL:http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/contribute/translation>.
> Announce your intention on debian-edu at lists dot debian dot org, and someone
> should assist you in the translation work.

Have any other culturally different groups looked into "localizing"
this distro (what have their comments been - if any) ?  Until some of
us use the distro to a much larger extent (Abdulaziz ?) we won't have
a full grasp on what is needed.  For instance, I'm not sure how the
alphabet is taught (since Arabic includes different visual forms for
the same letter for instance) or if there is reference to any historical
events, etc.  In short, we need to use the distro first and foremost
before we really can quantify what is needed for it to really be
natural and acceptable to an Arab child.  We've seen these issues among
others in various educational applications out there (Isam, care to
comment ?).

Regards,

 - Nadim


		
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