Representatives of the Junta of Extremadura (regional government) announced that a sweeping initiative has put 80,000 computers in schools across that region running a special version of Linux, GNU/LinEx. Our Take: I wish the government in my home country, Greece, also put together cheap $199 PCs (plus $60 1024×768@75Hz 15″ monitors) and give them away to high-schools. Problem is, we talk for at least $50m in hardware/support — Greece is a poor country. With time I guess…
80,000 School Computers Using GNOME in Spain
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>> Problem is, we talk for at
>> least $50m in hardware/support
>> as Greece is a poor country.
If you plan to deploy Linux in all Greek schools, and then leak the plan to Microsoft, they will probably be glad to write you a cheque for 50 million!
On a serious note, though, this is good news. I hope spanish readers here will clue us in on how this is going.
Hey, what about that guy who installed Debian for his newbie neigbour?? We never heared from him again
and thus you will see more and more people buying cheap linux-based pcs for schools, government, non-profit agencies, etc.
Developing regions are another opportunity. Africa, China, Parts of Latin america, India, these are all massive opportunities for linux.
Nuff said. GNOME is sweet. 80,000 users though! Wowee. Hope the Gnome team manage to nail some of the more embarassing bugs soon 🙂
Yeah, like the one that crashes the “About Gnome” window when you are pressing the close button.
Reproducible here on all my recent (2.2.1, 2.2.2-pre) Gnome installations, including Ximian’s and the PPC port.
One of the interesting side effects of these open source deployments like Munich and Spain is that they enforce hardware purchasing standards within their divisions for hardware that is Linux compatible only. In other words, they are putting pressure on hardware vendors to write good drivers for Linux because that is the only hardware they will buy, obviously, and these big deployments are going to start giving them some clout, resulting in the Linux desktop experience getting ever better.
Also, even if, for the sake of argument, KDE/GNOME is not quite as good a ‘desktop’ system as Windows XP, that doesn’t really matter. Corporations and governments functioned for years using the crappy Windows 9x series and they still managed to survive and get their work done. I think KDE/GNOME is far superior to Windows 9x, at the very least, and if Linux is able to save people massive amounts of money in licensing fees compared to going with MSFT while still getting the job done then that is all that matters, IMHO.
I’m curious why they chose Gnome instead of KDE…. Better salesmanship from the Gnome camp? Did they think it was more usable than KDE? Because they are planning to use Red Hat? It would be interesting to know the reasons they actually had for this decision. Whatever it is KDE should take notice.
Problem is, we talk for at least $50m in hardware/support as Greece is a poor country
Well, actually Extremadura is one of the poorest regions in Spain, and probably because of this (and a progressive government) are using linux in schools and all other public institutions. In other parts of spain regional governments are not so keen to change their OSes to a free alternative.
BTW, the distro is called GNU/LinEx, not GNU/LinuEx. There is a document in english explaining the initiative here: http://www.linex.org/linex2/linex/ingles/index_ing.html , and their homepage is at linex.org (in spanish).
Cheers, VÃctor
will wrote:
Because they are planning to use Red Hat?
Probably not, the distro is Debian based.
> Whatever it is KDE
> should take notice.
One thing KDE should certainly note is the simplicity in the Gnome layout. KDE is already a good interface, but it is just way too complex. It has too many options. That’s a good thing in some situations, but many ordinary folks would find that overwhelming.
One thing KDE should certainly note is the simplicity in the Gnome layout. KDE is already a good interface, but it is just way too complex. It has too many options. That’s a good thing in some situations, but many ordinary folks would find that overwhelming.
Think about it this way. Remember when we were in 1st gradae learning about Macs? “Hold down the Flower Button, then press S to save.” When deploying systems for kids, you generally use a locked-down version as much as possible anyway. Imagine taking most of the stuff out of the KDE menu, disabling the Control Panel, etc. Imagine doing something similar to KDE. Gnome still wins because the individual applications are less confusing.
> Gnome still wins because the individual applications are less confusing.
This is true. Gnome apps, especially the ones that follow the HIG are easier to learn.
I participated on both mailing lists in the past, of KDE and Gnome, I found the gnome devs more “sensitive” regarding usability and UI design.
> That’s a good thing in some situations, but many ordinary folks would find that overwhelming.
Which is why KIOSK exists. It effectively lets you lock down KDE to a point where KDE apps will only show one menu with the Quit button, or disable any kind of actions you want. It’s pretty nice for this kind of situation where you don’t want people to touch certain things or settings or what not.
That being said, not sure why they went with GNOME in this regard. Microsoft has offered this kind of systems integration tool for many years, and owes a lot of success to it. Last I heard, the GNOME developers were working on something like KIOSK, but AFAIK, it won’t be done until GNOME 2.6. gconf already supports access restrictions, but that’s pretty barebones compared to what systems intregrators need.
Anyways, good to see this happenning. as long as Microsoft is being replaced, all is good. Good luck to them!
Does it matter? UI is about functionality not politics. The choice is theirs not yours. They have made it based (hopefully) on real world reason rather than someones “dis-like” for KDE and vise versa.
kids probably still use windows pc at home for games.
I remember reading somewhere that the main issue Extremadura had with Windows was the refusal of Microsoft to sell them a translated version of the OS. Apparently, the government of that region was asked to pay for the translation (or do they say localisation ?). They found it to be a sure sign of arrogance, considering all the licencing fees they had been paying all over the years.
What attracted them to free software was the low cost, the freedom, along with the ability to use an operating system written in their own language (I believe it’s called extremaduran, or maybe it’s spanish).
I have to say this kind of problem isn’t limited to the IT industry. Very often, in poor areas, technicians have to put up with equipment built abroad (Germany, Japan or the US, for instance) that comes with manuals written in another language (german, japanese, english, …). Of course, it never occurs to the manufacturers that not everyone is fluent in those foreign languages.
Thanks for the link to http://www.linex.org/linex2/linex/ingles/linex_tecnico_ing.html , Victor.
It’s a pretty interesting mix of apps they have. Apparently they are using GNOME2 (2.2 now, I guess), with galeon and Mozilla as their browsers, OpenOffice as it’s office suite, and a mix of GNOME and KDE apps. Nice to see a distro maker mixing GNOME and KDE (concurrently) for a change, instead of picking one or the other cold turkey to run at one time.
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Does it matter? UI is about functionality not politics. The choice is theirs not yours. They have made it based (hopefully) on real world reason rather than someones “dis-like” for KDE and vise versa.
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Of course it matters! Presumably something can be learned it. If we knew what what those “real-world reasons” are, then both GNOME and KDE would benefit from it. GNOME would have confirmation for something they did right, and KDE would know what to correct.
> If we knew what what those “real-world reasons” are, then both GNOME and KDE would benefit from it.
The schools are not interested in baby-sitting KDE or GNOME. They are interested in doing their business and that’s all.
this is open source..
[i] > The schools are not interested in baby-sitting KDE or GNOME. They are interested in doing their business and that’s all.[i]
The schools aren’t creating this however. The distro maker is.
>I remember reading somewhere that the main issue >Extremadura had with Windows was the refusal of Microsoft >to sell them a translated version of the OS.
Since Extremadura is an Spanish-speaking region and every version of Windows is fully translated to Spanish what you said doesn’t make much sense. I think your are confusing Extremadura’s case with other’s Spanish regions as Cataluña Euskadi and Galicia which do have another official language _beside_ Spanish. By the way, people from Extremadura are called Extremeños so would be an hypothetic language
Yes, but it happens that this is THE spanish distro. What more natural to pick that distro? The distro maker just prefers Gnome, it just happens that. Other distros prefer KDE for that matter.
You try to find deep reasons, while the reason might not just be there.
Greece is perhaps a poor country. However, investing 50 millions in education will pay off decades later.
I think rich people could participate in that effort. After all, wasn’t Greece the homeland of icons such Onassis or Niarchos ? According to the Forbes list of the world richest persons, there is a Greek family (the Latsis) which is worth more than 3 billions.
The fact that we don’t hear about these billion/millionaires when we talk about free software in schools is a testimony to their lack of interest. They’d rather pay for trifles like paintings by a crazy self-mutilated man (Van Gogh).
They have the right to spend their money at will on silly stuff. However, we shouldn’t forget that places like the Standford University or the Howard Hughes Medical Institute were created by rich philanthropists (albeit crooked ones).
Mark,
Actually, the incident you are referring to did not happen in Extremadura but in Catalonia, a region of spain where catalan instead of spanish is spoken. MS has never translated any of his programs (or OSes) to catalan, but the catalan government funded a translation of W98 after much negotiation with MS. MS didn’t see commercially viable to translate it to catalan, as there are only 10 million catalan-speaking people. Here in Catalonia one of the big hits about linux is that it is translated to catalan.
In Extremadura they speak spanish, and all MS products are translated to spanish, so that was not a reason for the extremaduran government to migrate to linux.
BTW, as you have probably noticed, I’m catalan 😉
We will see more and more stories like these.
Actually, I believe every school in Greece is supposed to get a lab of about 12 machines that dual boot Windows and Linux. Here’s a related link (in Greek):
http://baza.source.gr/article.php3?sid=20010611203552
I don’t know what the progress of this project is.
> MS didn’t see commercially viable to translate it to catalan, as there are only 10 million catalan-speaking people
Greece also has 10 million people. And a translation of every Windows product.
Do all Catalan people speak spanish? Maybe MS thought that the Catalan people will be able to use the spanish version with the same ease.
This is only for 12 PCs on each *lab*, not on each *class*. This is the real difference.
We had a (half-a$$ed) chemistry lab in my high-school in Greece. We only got in it 3-4 times a year because our chemistry teacher prefered the normal class to teach than the lab.
Computers should be part of the every day studying/teaching process, not once a week when you got a class in the lab.
Well, it doesn’t cover all schools but only high-schools, but it’s a start. 10 years ago, when I graduated from high-school, most schools in Greece didn’t even have a Xerox copier.
heh, I am 1-2 years older than you are.
🙂
I hope Dell or HP would sell cheap PC’s loaded with linux and open office. That will bring the cost to 199 per pc since M$ charges $300 a pop on m$office and windoze.
Isnt Dell a partner with Redhat ..I wonder who is stopping Dell and HP to sell cheap linux desktop and laptops.
You think that is bad, try going to intermediate and finding the only computers there are BBC Micro’s? about the only thing I did pick up was learning how to program in BBC BASIC.
As for the topic at hand, this is a great step and better still these people will learn some REAL computer skills rather that the cheap superficial crap schools currently dole out which is comparable to a secretarial course.
Well, if Dell don’t want to do Linux, why not Solaris? it has GNOME, StarOffice and lots of other things available. IMHO, Solaris would be a good replacement for Windows on a desktop.
I wonder who is stopping Dell and HP to sell cheap linux desktop and laptops.
Actually Dell does offer Linux to large/medium corporations and if you call them as a Home/Home office customer you can probably request Linux instead of Windows.
I do recall reading a long time ago rumors that Microsoft threatened to yank licensing of Windows and other MS products for trying wo make Linux an option to consumers, and that the Feds said “you can’t do that.” But I can’t confirm it…just something I heard.
yeah, there actually *are* dual bootable linux/windows pcs in the Greek computer labs: each lab actually has a purchased version of RedHat linux along with staroffice 6 etc… it’s just that nobody really uses linux…
last year, my high school teacher in my region volos would only stick on M$ stuff…
after all, it’s the teacher’s personal choice, whether he/she wants to give linux a chance or not… (that’s what education generally is in Greece unfortunately: everything depends on the teacher)
it would be cool to follow this example though…
>Greece also has 10 million people. And a translation of >every Windows product.
>Do all Catalan people speak spanish? Maybe MS thought that >the Catalan people will be able to use the spanish version >with the same ease.
Yes, all Catalán speak Spanish, but the point was to have the tools to teach Catalán _in_ Catalán not English neither Spanish, and enable people use MS apps in Catalán if they wished to do so.
MS talked about money and the Generalitat (Catalonian Local Government) talked about culture.
“Greece also has 10 million people. And a translation of every Windows product.
Do all Catalan people speak spanish? Maybe MS thought that the Catalan people will be able to use the spanish version with the same ease.”
Greek is an official laguage, whereas “Catalonian” is not.
MS can’t cater for all dialects spoken throughout Europe. It’s symply impossible. Italy alone must have thousands ….
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The schools are not interested in baby-sitting KDE or GNOME. They are interested in doing their business and that’s all.
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That doesn’t make sense. No-one has suggested that Greek schools should babysit KDE or GNOME. What a curious suggestion. Someone made a decision, there has to be either a reason or a cause for the outcome. Or of course it could be coincidental, which would be interesting to know as well.
“Greece also has 10 million people. And a translation of every Windows product.
Do all Catalan people speak spanish? Maybe MS thought that the Catalan people will be able to use the spanish version with the same ease.”
Greek is an official laguage, whereas “Catalonian” is not.
MS can’t cater for all dialects spoken throughout Europe. It’s simply impossible. Just imagine to have to translate Xp into all italian dialects or into all variasions of swiss german……
I was talking about the Spanish schools, not the Greek ones. And read a previous message of mine, where I explain that there might not be a good reason as to “why gnome and not kde”.
And please use the proper subject when replying.
1) Microsoft has $40 billion in cash and they make a 85% margin on their product they sell. Are you really naive enough to think that they can’t cater for the various dialects?
2) Most European countries have standardise their language as with the case of German. If you know “Standard German” then it should work almost every place German is spoken. As for the regional dialects, part of its pronouciation and part is spelling. Most of the time there are ONLY a few word different. I don’t think those handful of words will make a difference to Microsoft bank balance.
Greece also has 10 million people. And a translation of every Windows product.
Do all Catalan people speak spanish? Maybe MS thought that the Catalan people will be able to use the spanish version with the same ease.
I hope MS wasn’t stupid enough to actually tell the catalans something like “Hey! why don’t you just use the spanish version, don’t you people speak spanish too?” Nothing can make the catalans more angry than their rivalry with the castillians (central spanish / madrid). I can still remember what happened when Figo left Barcelona FC to play for rival Real Madrid, the poor guy suffered hell each time he went back to barcelona to play, the same thing probably awaits David Beckham
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I was talking about the Spanish schools, not the Greek ones. And read a previous message of mine, where I explain that there might not be a good reason as to “why gnome and not kde”.
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hmm.. reading back… are you saying that a) GNOME are better on usability or b) There is no reason? You seem to be making both claims..? Either way, surly no-one can find this out by speculation.
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And please use the proper subject when replying.
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Perhaps I am
Can you blame the backlash? when a large number of fans worship someone, they expect atleast some loyalty in return. Unfortunately however football has become an arena where money talks, HOWEVER, with that being said atleast there aren’t players who simply come on to kick a goal and get paid a few million as with the case of American Football (gridiron).
“Most of the time there are ONLY a few word different. I don’t think those handful of words will make a difference to Microsoft bank balance.”
Your above claim is not exactly true. I speak English, Italian, German, Swiss German, Venetian, and understand a bit of Sicilian.
For argument sake, the differences between Venetian and Sicilian is far greater than a handful of words or a different pronunciation. BTW, why should MS or any S/W company spend money where there is little or no return?
Do you expect companies to wright manuals in all possible dialects? It doen’t make sense, doesn’t it.
> Greek is an official laguage, whereas “Catalonian” is not.
> MS can’t cater for all dialects spoken throughout Europe.
> It’s simply impossible. Just imagine to have to translate Xp
> into all italian dialects or into all variasions of swiss
> german……
I have to assume that you are from a isolated monolingual country (USA ?) to say something so stupid. Catalan is as an constitutional official language as Castillan is in Spain, it is spoken by one third of the population, it is also spoken in French Catalonia and Andorra. It is not a dialect but a 1000 year old romance language which has its own history, grammar, poetry and classic litterature just like Spanish, actually it is closer to French and Occitan than to Spanish.
Back then when the project in Extremadura started, Qt was not yet licenced GPL, so Debian didn’t support KDE.
In this case the “original sin” of the KDE project comes back to haunt them.
Quote from the gnome-devel mailing-list:
Alvaro <[email protected]>
<[email protected]>
Subject: RE: 2.4: System Tools – Please try them
Date: 03 Jun 2003 16:21:34 +0200
I think you know about the project yet: a region
of Spain is putting one PC per 2 person in each school. And they are
using a specific distribution called LinEx that uses Debian 3.0 and
GNOME 2.2.
Currently they use tools like “kuser” because in GNOME2 we don’t have
tools to admin the desktop. And they continue to use GNOME because the
first LinEx 2.0 was based in Debian 2.2 and GNOME 1.4.
Be careful. The SCO idiots may come knocking. Not like the EU cares for US companies anyhow.
Sagres, It’s very funny that you would mention that game. We have a friend from Cartagena visiting us here in Houston, TX and we were talking about that very fútbol game! You forgot to mention that they had to stop the game to remove the pig head that the angry fans threw into the arena!
You have to love the passion that the rest of the world (outside the US) has for fútbol/soccer. I believe that part of the passion stems from sheer poverty. Noone has money for the fancy pads, shoes and uniforms. However, if you throw a ball into the street, you make 20 kids very happy! I expect that we will continue to see Linux embraced around the globe for the same reasons, giving under priveleged nations a chance for a better education.
Since Cataluña’s population is around 6.5m and not all of them speak Catalán, I think that 10m figure is a bit too optimistic.
(Should the truth be considered flamebait?)
Anyway, Extremadura’s not the only region embracing Linux in Spain. Last month, during local elections campaign, the now mayor of Zaragoza made one of his promises to promote the use of Linux and free software on government and institutions. The difference, besides the fact that Extremadura is already on this for at least a year, is that they actually went and sponsored the creation of the LinEx distribution at Extremadura’s University. It was expected that they’d later use the distro as much as they could.
Extremadura is certainly a poor region, but at least they’re making some efforts.
Andalucia, or “Andalusia” as they call it in English, Spain’s largest and most densely populated region is to follow in the steps of Extremadura. Watch this space for a similar announcement a few months down the road.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Microsoft’s licensing agreements with OEMs, but they’re not allowed to sell machines with Windows on them. The best they can do is provide machines with Windows and Linux dual-booted (with MS as default).
To solve the problem of lacking tools to admin the system, the inclusion of “Gnome System Tools” in the Gnome desktop is being discussed. They’re being already used in an experimental Spanish distro, Gnome-live. More info:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gst/
http://metadistros.hispalinux.es/download.html#gnome-live-cd
P.S.: Gnome-live is part of a bigger project, metadistros. It aims to create an easily understandable an usable structure to build live-cd distros in an easy way.
That seems like flawed thinking to me – surely it’s the job of the distros to provide tools like kuser? OK, so Debian doesn’t provide them, so use Red Hat instead which does.
I’m not sure using Debian stable in this situation was such a smart idea, but I guess they liked the fact that it’d be supported for a long time. GNOME2.2 on its own is not a strong enough desktop IMHO, needs distro support. Same goes for KDE by the way. As it stands KDE has a collection of small utilities that may or may not be present/work on any given distro, and don’t integrate with the ones the distro provides etc.
Well, talking about Andalucia, I must say that it is only called “Andalusia” in the south of Spain.
But apart from that, yes, they are taking steps towards having some flavour of Linux in that region, as well as in Aragón (someone spoke of Zaragoza, which is the capital of Aragón).
A few years from now I think every Spanish region governated by the Socialist Party (as those mentioned above are) will be deploying linux.
On the other hand, if Microsoft has never done a correct translation of its programs to Spanish, I don’t think they will ever consider to translate them to less spoken languages.
By the way, I didn’t know there were so many Spanish people around here 😉
> That seems like flawed thinking to me –
> surely it’s the job of the distros to
> provide tools like kuser?
Well, would be a good thing to a have a standard set of tools for Gnome. Probably Gnome-System-Tools will make it into either Gnome-2.4 or Gnome-2.6. RedHat’s tools are much better though, and I’m using them for my own distro. But are not easily adaptible to a existing distro, because they take kudzu for granted. Gnome-System-Tools are designed to be distribution independent through perl-backends.
> I’m not sure using Debian stable in this
> situation was such a smart idea, but I
> guess they liked the fact that it’d be
> supported for a long time.
I could think of two reasons.
First, Debian es better customizable. RedHat is more integrated (good!), but if you have your own ideas, Debian is more flexible.
Second, RedHat some time in the future may change towards a more proprietary policy a la SuSE. Better safe then sorry.
I suppose this is off topic, but I wonder why Greece is a poor country?
Is it because the goats turned the place into a desert?
Actually, there’s already a law (“decreto” in the original, don’t know if it’s the right translation) in AndalucÃa that gives priority to free software and its compatible hardware to be used in the administration. The informative bulletin that includes this law is here (PDF in Spanish):
http://boja.andaluciajunta.es/boja/cgi-bin/frame_pagina.cgi?2003-55…
The used distro, as far as I know, would be a modified version of Linex. They want to collaborate with Extremadura on it, so it makes sense.
And I don’t think the socialist parties are the only ones interested in using free software. Although the central government is easily manipulated by people like Ballmer, there’re some cases of members of the Partido Popular (“Popular Party”, the same one that right now is in the central government and is supposed to be the antagonist of socialist parties here) taking note of it. The Partido Popular division in Valencia (another place of Spain) proposed its use in its region. More info (Spanish only, sorry) here:
http://www.internautas.org/article.php?sid=937
> I suppose this is off topic, but I wonder why Greece is > a poor country?
> Is it because the goats turned the place into a desert?
Although I didn’t understand your joke with the goats (at least I hope that it was meant as a joke), I have to say that there are many reasons why Greece is a poor country. But in my opinion the most important is that it is the first time in modern Greece’s history that we have 28 continuous years without a war or a dictatorship. From 1821 (when modern Greece was established) until 1975 there was always something going wrong that held Greece back. Fortunately, this is not anymore the case and finally we are starting to put our pieces together. I can say that things are changing, the results are starting to show and I really hope that this trend will continue.
Not that there are no other problems, but we are trying. Have some patience 🙂
By the way, I thing that Spain had about the same problems with us and as far as I know they are not much better than Greece (at least according to the statistics of the EU 🙂
Actually Dell does offer Red Hat Linux to their “mid to large size business” customers. Go ahead and configure a workstation on their site…RH is available as an alternative to Windows.
By the way, I thing that Spain had about the same problems with us and as far as I know they are not much better than Greece (at least according to the statistics of the EU 🙂
Spain was a dictatorship until 1975, true. Then, when dictator Franco died, the government system changed to a democratic royalty (that is, our King and Queen only act as international public relationship, although in theory they have a little of weight in decissions). Since then, this country has progressed a lot and it looks unbelievable when you compare our lifestate now and around 30 years ago.
>Since then, this country has progressed a lot and it looks unbelievable when you compare our lifestate now and around 30 years ago.
This is exactly what I mean. The same happened in Greece. My comparison between Spain and Greece was not to say that our countries haven’t developed since then or that Spain has developed less than Greece, but that we are approximately at the same level currently, due to similarities in our history.
Well, I’m skipping the “My country is better/worse/equal than yours” part since I’ve never been in Greece and I wouldn’t know. That’s why I talk about the situation in my country without talking about Greece’s.
Localisation is important for cultural purposes. In many parts of the world there are moves for bilingual education. Microsoft is never going top port a language with only thousands of speakers. In Australia aboriginal children in some areas often start school with very limited English skills so they need to be taught in both English and their native tongue.
By the way, I thing that Spain had about the same problems with us and as far as I know they are not much better than Greece (at least according to the statistics of the EU 🙂
Spain has one of the greatest economical growth figures of the whole EU. The EU statistics are very favorable to Spain. We even made it to the Euro in the first round of adoption and without sweating.
And remember that according to international studies (UN?) only the Canadian quality of life is better than the Spanish.
This “We are better than you” discussion is out of place here. Each side can start digging studies that shows a country is better or worse than the other, as desired, and it won’t serve or demonstrate anything.
Catalonian, Galician and Vasque *are* oficial lenguages in Spain besides Spanish. They are not dialects but “full featured” lenguages.
> This “We are better than you” discussion is out of place here.
I agree. I am sorry to bring this up, but it was not my intention to start arguing that one country is better than another. I just tried to strengthen my argument that there are historical reasons why Greece is poorer than other countries, using another example with similarities in history. So, I apologise if someone felt offended by what I said and I suggest we stop here.
By the way, I have been twice to Barcelona, as our Lab at the University closely collaborates with the Computer Architecture Department at the Universitat Polytecnica de Catalunya and I have to say that it is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. It crossed even my mind to go and live there. But even if I don’t manage to do that I will certainly visit it again. It is not enough to visit just once Sagrada Familia!
(Just wanted to express myshelf, sorry for being off topic)
viva espagna (did i spell it correctly)
To those who compared Basque (hope the spelling is right) to italian dialects, you are making a big mistake:
Basque IS the OFFICIAL language of a cultural minority (well, not really a minority in their own region), and it obviously have its grammar, syntax and standard written form.
Italian dialects are NOT “official languages”, and in Italy it is normal to consider them “spoken only” languages.
There rarely is a formalised grammar and/or written form. In some cases there isn’t a clear way of how to represent PHONEMES of italian dialects, let alone writing long texts.
Remember the standard italian alphabet has only 21 letters, and xywjk are only used in very rare cases.
Differently from other countries dialects, however, they are normally UTTERLY different from the italian language AND to one another. When people of different regions met 50 years ago literally couldn’t understand each other. Only the advent of TV created a true italian language.
Here it is normal that tiny villages (less than 1000 inhabitants) with less than a km in between have VERY different dialects, with sometimes very different words and accents.
ThanatosNL wrote:
Remember when we were in 1st gradae learning about Macs? “Hold down the Flower Button, then press S to save.”
Learning Macs in 1st grade?!?
Macs weren’t even out when I was in 6th grade, let alone 1st. I suddenly feel old…
Gonzalo wrote:
Since Cataluña’s population is around 6.5m and not all of them speak Catalán, I think that 10m figure is a bit too optimistic.
I was talking about catalan-speaking population, not catalunya’s population. That includes a lot of people from valencia, baleares, andorra and southern france, though I’m sure you are already aware of that.
pascal: I couldn’t have said that better 😉
Re: Spain is not better
By Another one from Barcelona (IP: 62.97.108.—) – Posted on 2003-06-19 10:34:47
Spain has one of the greatest economical growth figures of the whole EU. The EU statistics are very favorable to Spain. We even made it to the Euro in the first round of adoption and without sweating.
And remember that according to international studies (UN?) only the Canadian quality of life is better than the Spanish.
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Last summer I read an international study about quality of life (top20) and Spain wasn’t listed. The best quality-of-life countries were Canada (1st), Sweden, Norway and the US (5th place).
Yes, I agree the Spanish economy is growing. But the other countries have already grown. There are still lots of differences. Spain imports more than exports. Spain is growing thanks to the EU economic aids. It gets more than it gives. So please give all the facts!! The most devolped countries are the same as always (at least in the EU): Germany, France and UK. All Southern EU states (Portugal, Spain and Greece) have about the same level of unemployment (pretty high), low salaries, … Italy is the best state to live in of Southern Europe.
Extremadura has choosen Linux instead of Windows just because it’s a poor region.
Greece and Spain have things in common; they suffered a dictatorship, many economic difficultes,… except for one thing (at least);
GREECE: in 1974 a referendum created a parliamentary republic and abolished the monarchy…
SPAIN: that never happened…
Monarchy is another kind of dictatorship.
nothing wrong with monarchy as long as it isn’t dictatorial, all european monarchies at the moment other then say Liechenstein and Monaco are parlimentry democracies.
I’m no fan of monarchy but then again i’m Irish so what u expect 😉
as for the 50 million, well the greek goverment could no doubt apply for cohesion funding off the EU, they could either get full funding or the EU could provide say 20-30% of cost. We use to get alot of it here, especially for motorway building, but was also use for extensions to universities etc.
If I was putting something in schools, I’d probably go with GNOME too, even though I use KDE on my own machines. Less stuff to push = less ability to break things. However, it would be nice to know the reasons they chose GNOME over KDE. While they may not be interested in babysitting GNOME and KDE, its in their best interest for them to improve. A little feedback from 80,000(!) test users would be extremely valuable to the development teams, and would cost the schools nothing. Remember, this is a community development model, and it operates fundementally differently from a commercial model.
GREECE: in 1974 a referendum created a parliamentary republic and abolished the monarchy…
SPAIN: that never happened…
In Spain a parliament was constituted, a constitution written and most powers went to said parliament. The only difference with the Greece case is the king is still here, though he couldn’t be a dictator even if he tried.
You know, I’m spanish too and I don’t like foreigners getting a wrong impression of my country. I don’t mean a bad impression. I mean wrong.
We’re talking about 80,000 computers, the number of users may be near 200,000 counting every pupil, teacher and school-related workers…
We’re talking about 80,000 computers, the number of users may be near 200,000 counting every pupil, teacher and school-related workers…
Since it is suppossed to be 2 people per computer, this means 160,000.
Hey! Most of us Spaniards love our King!
He sided with the people when the menace of another dictatorship hovered over our heads and helps keep a stability in the state structure that we didn’t have in the past.
Commenting on something as subjective as monarchy or republic is always going to hurt somebody’s feelings. It’s not something as simple as republic is good and monarchy is bad.
Regarding the topic of this discussion I must say that I have mixed feelings about LinEx… They have taken GNOME and changed a lot of basic things. The names and icons of the apps are changed and substituted by the names of famous people or places from Extremadura. I thought user interfaces should be intuitive but I just don’t see the relationship between the Meridan Roman Theatre and a spreadsheet, for example. That wasn’t good design: an operating environment shouldn’t be that nationalized, those are sepparate matters.
And if you have doubts so far, yes, I am a Spaniard too, another one from Barcelona… 😉 But I am Aragonese by birth.
Can you please stop that political off topic stuff here, or do you want me to mod you all down?
Spain is growing thanks to the EU economic aids. It gets more than it gives. So please give all the facts!! The most devolped countries are the same as always (at least in the EU): Germany, France and UK. All Southern EU states (Portugal, Spain and Greece) have about the same level of unemployment (pretty high), low salaries, … Italy is the best state to live in of Southern Europe.
Sorry man, but in many cities of Spain (like Madrid and Barcelona) we have a higher life level than the average of the rest of Europe.
It’s good the Extramadura has chosen to use Linux, rather than pressure Microsoft to provide translated software. Spain isn’t the only country with more than one official language. The U.K. has Welsh, for example, but the most interesting case is Norway, with BokmÃ¥l and Nynorsk. Microsoft wouldn’t translate Office into Nynorsk (less than half a million speakers) but the Nynorsk advocates managed to persuade most of Norway’s high schools to boycott Microsoft unless it agreed to a translation/localisation.
This is an area which many software companies don’t often appreciate, but only major companies like Microsoft have to consider it. There are about 25 languages with some sort of official status in Europe alone, and to support one and not another can be interpreted as a political act by certain groups (especially in areas withstrong regional identities).
Supporting more than one language is a major undertaking for a software company. The program itself isn’t such a problem; for many European languages all it involves is word substitution and then a recompile. However, programs often have help files, and more complex software tend to have more dialogue boxes, all of which need to be translated.
One way around it is has been adopted by Opera (Norwegian, funnily enough), which has language files which affect the menus and the “internal” text of the browser, and language versions of the browser, which have translations of the help files.
It would be an interesting exercise to see what would happen if, as was threatened in Norway, there was a mass boycott of Microsoft unless Windows and Office were translated into all the official languages (Galician, Catalan, Basque etc..) The downside would be that, although expensive, Microsoft probably could do this, and all that would happen would be that Microsoft would end up with a bigger market.
The important point that non-English speaking countries should note is that no government can force a foreign company to continue to support a language version of it’s software, so there could be problems further down the road if they accept the Microsoft shilling.