More languages (Re: Kiswahili spoken? Skolelinux@Kenya?)
man, 27,.06.2005 kl. 22.51 +0200, skrev RalfGesellensetter:
> Hi there,
>
> we (my school that is) has got a parter school near Nairobi. At this
> very moment, a delegation of students and teachers is down there - and
> I got the first request for (non-free) educational software.
>
> We tried our best to show the chance of free software, but alas, people
> tend to reccomend what they use at home -- and so far free software is
> no too widely used among the collegues travelling.
>
> This raises some questions to me:
> 1. Is anybody on this list aware of Schools near Nairobi that already
> use free software, or of something like a LUG-Kenya?
> 2. Does anybody here speak Kiswahili and could translate some
> correspendung articles from English to
> http://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mwanzo (I think of kdeedu or Skolelinux)?
I'd like to extend on that one:
The organisation Fair (http://fairinternational.org/) have (or is
starting) some larger Projects in Eritrea, Kenya and also Russia.
The thing we do is get hold of old computers, erase the harddisk and
reinstall them with something fitting for the project. Mostly in schools
(Eritrea, Kenya, ..) but the project in Murmansk (Russia) is for a
hospital.
We're mostly using Skolelinux, but we cooperate with other projects and
also the recipients have their requests.
Not all that sure about the Kenya project, but from what I've heard,
it's going to be both Linux and MSwindows.
Now what I'm sure about (heard from someone who grew up there), they're
using English from primary school and up. They also use the latin
alphabet for Swahili, no additions.
It won't be that much of a problem for us on from a formal perspective,
that is. How far decisions are made on the idea of «hey, I want to use
Swahili too, at least privately», I don't know.
But meeting with a Linux User Group would be nice.
Do you have any addresses to share, Ralph?
As far as the Eritrea project goes, they use English in the schools
where we have projects. They'd still (at least privately) like to use
their languages though.
That basically means support for their scripts, translations haven't
come far yet (except for Arabic of course, dialects of Arabic are very
much used along the southern coast). (Not that we have come to any of
these regions yet.)
That means Arabic, Geez (an ancient script used in Ethiopia and Eritrea)
and latin (UTF8-based, please).
The «locale» packages can be confusing when it comes to coding standards
for Geez, so I'd like to wait for some more input.
Then we have the hospital project in Murmansk.
The idea so far is to mix the infrastucture of Skolelinux with medical
applications. (My neighbor here is trying out Care2x. Any other
suggestions?)
We'd also like to hire one or two persons for:
1) Translating necessary programs into russian. Mostly medical
applications.
2) Support and system administration (maintenance, installations etc) at
the hospital in Murmansk.
That means locals, with wages according to local standards. Solid
knowledge of Linux (Debian in particular) is a must.
Does any of you know how to get hold of such people?
Any recommends?
Happy camping.
Harald
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