Ubuntu Arabic Support

[Anmar Oueja <situmam at gmail dot com>]

Salam Shabab wa Shabbat:

Happy new year everyone. Hopefully it is full of good stuff for Arabic
and Linux together.

Although I haven't been much of a Linux user (mostly Mac OS X due to
work), I kept my eyes open and found a few golden nuggets that I think
the Arabic/Linux community could definitely benefit from.

I am talking about a web-based localization tool used by the entire
Ubuntu project. The tool is called Rosetta and it is designed to allow
the entire Linux community to register projects (i.e. OpenOffice) and
start translating it using simple web browsers.  for example, here is
a link to this tool, named Rosetta by the Ubuntu people showing you a
group of projects that were registered within it and have some Arabic
localization:

<https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+lang/ar>

Now if you click on any of progress bars, you will be prompted to
login so register and check it out (it is free).

Since Ossama has done an amazing job working on OpenOffice (almost 95%
complete) I think we can start by starting the OpenOffice 2.0 Arabic
localization in Rosetta (including all the translated work) then ask
people to start working on it to help Ossama out.  We can also start a
group of Arabic localization team on Rosetta to allow us better
control over who does what and who reviews and confirms what.

The good news is that our translation will make it automatically to
all future releases of Ubuntu and Debian, which is great as we don't
have to worry about builds, installation scripts ... etc.

Chances are you guys know about this and already working on it as I
see Ossama's name on some of the files in the link posted above.  I am
not sure it if was him who added it or Rosetta picked it up from the
.po files.  Any how, I think it is something  worth mentioning in case
it wasn't

Rosetta's URL is : <https://launchpad.net/rosetta>


Let me know

Anmar