[Devel] Re: debain based schoolserver/client system

[Herman Robak <herman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 2002-12-15 at 14:14, Frank Matthieß wrote:
> Hello Herman,
> 
> we - a group of hackers, teachers, students and admins - are intrested
> in your project of buildung a schoolaware debian based
> distribution/system.

 "Your" as in "eure", I presume.  I'm just our i18n contact person. :-)


> As you see(.de), we are german people, which able to communicate also in
> english. We are very intrested to help/participate to this project.

 Toll!  Wir brauchen düchtige Leute.  We need testers, bugfixers,
documentation authors, usability guidance.  Making a usable distro
is a lot of work!

 Besides, our focus goes way beyond a "usable distro".  We want a
turnkey school distro:

* It should _never_ ask about hardware that can be autoprobed
* It should never ask about confiruration details for which
	there are sensible defaults.
* It should never leave installed software unconfigured.
* It shall ask four questions upfront, install, and say "done".
* The installation manual shall be short, simple and yet complete!
* All the services; firewall, dhcp, web-cache, web server, mail,
	home directories (NFS), printing, file sharing, 
	authentication, LDAP, webmin, shall _just work_,
	once installed, with very little input during
	installation. (preferably without _any_ human input!)


> Are there a chance to someone of the group to translate the webpages to
> english, and for i18n and base development to make a maillinglist in
> english? 

 We already have a developer mailing list in English:
devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx  We made it after a request from
Lithuania (Litauen).

 i18n: What should be the scope of an i18n list?  There are
several GNU- and KDE-related ones already.  Maybe we should
step back and look around to see if some of the existing
mailing lists are more appropiate.  I like the idea, but I
resent duplicate effort and fragmentation!


> This should be helpfull from a european/international view.
> 
> We dont want to reenvent the wheel, and makeing this projekt
> international will help you developing and testing the concepts and
> implementations. 

 Hear, hear!  Our core people sympathise strongly with
these thoughts!  The translators could use some international
help, too; there are lots of technical quirks in their
workflow that should have been worked out.


> What can we do to make your project international?

 By finding some people who can read Scandinavian, who
are willing to translate our main pages and documents,
among other things.  Local projects WILL predominantly
use their native tongue as working language.
 One of our key architects, Petter Reinholdtsen, suggested
that linuxiskolen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (the most important of our
mailing lists) should switch to English.  He didn't gain
much support.  The main argument was that the teachers
would be put off by that: A Norwegian project furthering
Norwegian language, using English as working language! 
I know it sounds a bit silly, but when Norwegians get
political ... 
 When more and more people start writing in English to our
mailing lists, that sentiment may change.  More people will
realise that you may actually be able to further your own
language while speaking English.

 You may wonder why this is such an issue?  Norwegian is
a small language, facing a constant threat of degrading
into pidgin-Scandinavian or pidgin-English.

-- 
 Herman Robak
 herman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx