Talk:Ethiopian Millenium Gift Project

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where are the patriotic ethiopians? we need this project more than anyone on earth.

  • In time every one wil come. But we who arrived first have to start the job. Lets go to the respective translation sites and start working. Please do register so that the system knows who you are. The more your real contribution the more your previlages in the system will be. That is automatic. So go ahead and make your presence felt.

Building the OLPC_Ethiopia wikimedia page

Are you trying to produce the following effect at the top of the Article page?

 
 
 

There may be a better way to do it. I got the above by adapting one of the lines from near the bottom of the Sandbox page.

I hope that this helps.

Best wishes for the project.

  • Yes I was trying to do that in a less intrusive way. If you can produce the some thing with the size at the page please go ahead. If you have know how on how to format wikimedia pages, you can go ahead and improve the main page too.

There are already books in Amharic

Books already exist in the Amharic language but they cannot be used in education because the cost of printing more copies and transporting them to where the kids are, is prohibitive. If only existing books could be used in an ebook reader, then infinite copies could be made and only one ebook reader needs to be distributed, not a hundred books. The OLPC is that ebook reader and using Evince with its support for DJVU format, enables existing paper books to be scanned and distributed with the OLPC. No special fonts are needed to support the minority languages. Even handrwitten books can be scanned and distributed this way.

  • That is a very good point. Can you develop on that idea and provide us with ways to include in to the project.
You are going to need someone with technical skills and a Linix computer. The tools for encoding are documented here http://djvulibre.djvuzone.org/doc/man/djvu.html for a technical person to set up an encoding system.
  • I Hope some one with the right knowledge would volunteer to act up on this suggestion. The problem with most tools is that they are designed with only the professionals in mind or you have to get special skill to use them. What really we need is tools that enable the common volunteer to channel his/her contribution. I am not an expert on this but what the professionals need to do is build that crucial bridge or tunnel for us mortals to do our thing.Teferra 05:19, 9 June 2006 (EDT)

Relevance to OLPC

6/16/2006 - khassounah: This is a great effort and drive Teferra. I just saw the Ubuntu Amharic Translation project.

Three points I want to make:

  1. The software that is running on the laptop will overlap with existing distributions today (Ubuntu and Fedora), but will contain a set of other applications that will encourge interaction and sharing between the children in a school or out-of-school setting. I would recommend that you make those part of your overall effort as they become more defined and ready for translation. Keep an eye on the Sugar project discussed on this wiki.
  2. A great way to make sure your translations and software is usable in any distribution including OLPC's is to make sure that all your contributions are made up-stream. Meaning that all changes or translations made are checked into the root project as opposed to being applied after the main software is released. This will also reduce the overall continuous work that needs to be done to keep the software running in Amharic.
  3. These country pages will be used to discuss, coordinate and communicate the state of software, challenges and deployment in those various countries. Given the scope of this page, I would recommend that you move it into its own page The Ethiopian Millennium Gift Project, and link to it from here.

thanks khassounah. We will fallowup on your recomendation.