Xfce News
The little mouse told me...

Quick update on the Xubuntu Strategy Document. I’ve made some tweaks and am now looking to organize the next big Xubuntu community meeting. I was thinking June 18th at 1900 UTC. What do you folks think? For the meeting, I’ll have further updated the strategy document and also have our specifications for Intrepid written. If the meeting goes well, I’ll start implementing it all right away.

Thoughts? Feelings? Concerns? Super excited yet?! Woot! I know I am

P.S. Feel free to join us in #xubuntu-devel on freenode

As I’m sure I’ve already mentioned either on my blog or in my video interview on Youtube (which makes me look weird due to some ratio/pixel issue, hehe), the Ubuntu Developer Summit is and has been an excellent opportunity for myself and the Xubuntu project. Wheres the proof in the pudding? Well, I’m here to show you! It has been half a dozen weeks or so since the hugely successful Xubuntu community meeting led by the community manager Jono. At that meeting, it was decided that I would be tasked with developing a strategy document which participants agreed would enable Xubuntu to overcome some of the difficulties the project had begun to encounter from its ever enduring growth. After yesterday’s Xubuntu strategy session at UDS, where I was able to get feedback from other developers and colleagues, I’m happy to present to the community at large the first public draft of the Xubuntu strategy document. I encourage *everyone* to take a read and send your feedback, comments, suggestions, concerns, etc. etc. to my e-mail inbox: cody-somerville@ubuntu.com

So, when is the next big Xubuntu community meeting to finalize and find consensus? I’ll be announcing the date and time on either Monday or Tuesday of this upcoming week. Please keep your eyes posted!

Xubuntu rocks!! Be sure to join us on IRC in #xubuntu and #xubuntu-devel - woot woot!

Although this one isn’t that exciting, I’ve decided to finally take part in my first “meme ” like Tiago Faria has.

• Firefox 3 with 10 tabs (lucky ducks, I just closed three windows :P)
• Pidgin buddy list
• Pidgin IM window with four tabs.
• Terminal with three tab.
• Rythmbox media player
• XChat window with 2 servers with 21 and 2 channels opened respectively.
• Skype

Well, I need to hit the shower and get ready for the day (Currently 20 after 5am here in Prague and I’m looking out at a beautiful overcast city). We have some very important sessions today at UDS including the reorganization of the archive, the Xubuntu strategy document,  and much more.

XUBUNTU ROCKS! Want to help Xubuntu out? You might want to visit  the Xubuntu Team package bugs overview to see all of the packages that the Xubuntu team subscribes to along with the number of open, critical, unassigned, and in progress bugs for each package. You can then click on the number under open to list all the open bugs for a package and from there you can start doing something we call bug triage. You can find more information about how to be an effective and helpful bug triager by reading the “Helping with bugs” and “How to traige bugs” wiki pages. By getting bugs triaged (ie. in a state when developers can quickly and easily process bug reports to provide the much wanted bug fix) we make Xubuntu that much better!

Got questions? Feel free to ask on #xubuntu-devel

Everyone who works with the translation of free and open source software must know the web site Open-Tran.eu (if you don’t, I highly recommend it!), a translation repository online.

To quote Jacek, the brain behind the project:

Proprietary software vendors may (if they can afford it) use CAT or TM software in order to ensure the consistency of their applications’ terminology. Unfortunately, there are many different software vendors who are not willing to share their knowledge (which includes translation memory databases) with the others.

And this is where the open source software could prove to be better than the proprietary. It could, but is not. Although everybody has full access to the translations of many open source programs, this opportunity is hardly ever used. The knowledge of hundreds (if not thousands) of people translating applications into their native languages is not centralized and thus hardly available to the others. This is the reason why the translations of even the most popular programs are not consistent with each other, which discourages people from using them.

I’d like the Open-Tran.eu service to fill this gap and to provide the translators with a useful tool, which may improve the quality of their translations and increase the consistency of terminology in the open source software.·

One cool thing about this service is that you can observe problems with the standardization of terms within a project, where certain applications may have a term translated one way, and completely different on other applications. Want to see a nice example? Type the word “plugin” in the search field or clique this link, to see the discrepancies of how it was translated across several projects.

Want to see something even cooler? You could write a fairly simple application to access this gold mine, and fetch the information you need via the XML-RPC interface, a nice touch to the mix! Check out the provided python script!

Today Jacek informed me that Open-Trans.eu has included the translations for the XFCE project, augmenting the repository and definitely making my life a whole lot easiet when analysing the Brazilian Portuguese translations for the project.

I’m extremely proud to announce that the XFCE desktop environment, well known for being a lighter alternative to GNOME or KDE, is completely translated (upstream) to Brazilian Portuguese!

A total of over 80 different programs and components off the XFCE and Goodies repositories, with over 6000 strings, I believe that XFCE is the first complex desktop environment to be completely translated to Brazilian Portuguese! The core components had been 100% translated for about 1 week now, as can be see in the stats page, mas yesterday I finished my research and noticed that all the other components were also finished. Now I get to keep my eye on any changes that may happen until the 4.4.6 release takes place.