Get the Ubuntu Online Tour on your LoCo site

I’m thrilled to announce the availability of the Ubuntu 12.04 Online Tour for local community teams to localize and use on their websites. The tour has been the result of the stunning work done by Ant Dillon from the Canonical Web Design Team and should provide a web-based first impression of Ubuntu to new users, now in their language.

It’s a great opportunity to showcase Ubuntu to your local community to celebrate release day tomorrow.

Where is it?

• Go to the Ubuntu Online Tour  on Launchpad
• Translate the Ubuntu Online Tour

How can I use it for my LoCo website?

First of all, you’ll need to get set up with the right tools before you start.

Getting set up:

• Bazaar. Install the bzr revision control system
• Polib. Install the polib library
• Terminal. You’ll need to run the commands below on a terminal. Simply press Ctrl+Alt+T to fire up a new terminal console.

If you’ve already translated the tour in Launchpad, you can build a localized version in 3 easy steps:

1. Get the code:

bzr branch lp:ubuntu-online-tour/12.04

2. Build the localized tour:

cd 12.04
cd translate-html/bin
./translate-html -t

3. Deploy the tour:

• This will vary depending on your setup, so simply make sure you copy the chromeless, css, img, js, pie and videos folders along with the videoplayer.swf file to your site. In addition, you will need the en folder and the folder for your language created in the previous step.

If you haven’t finished the translation for your language in Launchpad, you will need to complete the corresponding PO file before you run step 2. Just ask on the Ubuntu translators mailing list or on Launchpad in case you need help or are not familiar with PO files.

For any issues, suggestions or enhancement, use the Online Tour’s Launchpad project to report bugs or submit improvements.

Enjoy!

Ubuntu Global Jam events: jamming Catalan style

If you follow the Ubuntu channels, and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that this coming weekend we’re organizing the Ubuntu Global Jam, a worldwide event where Ubuntu local community teams (LoCos) join in a get-together fest to have some fun while improving Ubuntu.

As we’re ramping up to a Long Term Support release, this is a particularly important UGJ and we need all hands on deck to ensure that it does not only meet, but exceeds the high quality standard of previous Ubuntu LTS releases. This is another article in the series of blog posts showcasing the events our community is organizing, brought to you by Rafael Carreras, from the Ubuntu Catalan LoCo team.

Tell us a bit about your LoCo team

Our LoCo is language-oriented, and by language I mean Catalan (a Romanic one), not Perl or Python. In fact, the Catalan LoCo Team was the first language-oriented LoCo to be approved back in 2007. We manage our day-to-day in three mailing lists: technical doubts, team work and translations and do IRC meetings twice a month. We organise Ubuntu Global Jam events every 6 months (with some minor absences) and of course great release parties every 6 months along with some other little ones in between.

What kind of event are you organizing for this Ubuntu Global Jam?

As always, we will translate some new packages, discuss translation items, a bug triage session, some install release work and even evangelization to some passing people, as we organise UGJ this time in a civic centre.

Is this the first UGJ event you’re organizing?

No, it’s not, we are running UGJs since the first one and I think we only missed last one.

How do you think UGJ events help the Ubuntu community and Ubuntu?

It’s a great opportunity for meeting people you only know by email or chat. Also, as we sit down together, there is little room for procrastination. Well, more or less, anyway.

Why do you think Jono Bacon always features pictures of the Catalan team when announcing the UGJ? Are we the most good-looking LoCo?

Yeah, definitely. It must be that.

Join the party by registering your event at the Ubuntu LoCo Portal!

p1010458 by Alex Muntada

Upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam events: here’s how the Slovenian team rolls

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that this coming weekend we’re organizing the Ubuntu Global Jam, a worldwide event where Ubuntu local community teams (LoCos) join in a get-together fest to have some fun while improving Ubuntu. As we’re ramping up to a Long Term Support release, this is a particularly important UGJ and we need every hand on deck to ensure it not only meets but exceeds the standard of previous Ubuntu LTS releases. This is another article in the series of blog posts showcasing the events our community is organizing, brought to you by Andrej Znidarsic, from the Ubuntu Slovenian LoCo team.

Tell us a bit about your LoCo team

The Slovenian Ubuntu LoCo team was founded in 2005 and we try to spread Ubuntu mainly by translation work and help and support to Slovenian Ubuntu users who don’t have the means (either language or technical knowledger barrier) to solve problems themselves. Slovenian has been among the top translated languages for a while, which is quite impressive considering there are only 2 million native speakers and we don’t have a big pool to get translators from. We operate an IRC channel, website, forum, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ page. Offline we meet at monthly Ubuntu hours and we do Global Jams

What kind of event are you organizing for the upcoming Ubuntu Global Jam (UGJ)?

We are mostly going to focus on translations. This has traditionally been our strong point, as we exceeded 90% translation of Ubuntu about 2 years ago. Now we are focusing on translation quality and consistency. This time we want to put extra polish into translation for the LTS. In addition to that, a couple of people will focus on creating videos explaining how to perform basic tasks in Ubuntu (installing Ubuntu, Installing/removing software, Unity “tricks”…) and how to contribute to Ubuntu (how to start translating in Launchpad, how to report a bug, common translation mistakes in Slovenian). We will also be testdriving Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and report bugs we find on the way. More info can be found in our Ubuntu Global Jam announcement (in Slovenian only).

Is this the first UGJ event you’re organizing?

Nope. We have already organized 3 Ubuntu Global Jams. The first one was online only and the last two have been organized offline. We are quite lucky to have Kiberpipa, which has kindly been providing us a great venue with a lot of space and internet access. So we mostly need to do marketing of the event, coordinate transport and grab some pizzas .

How do you think UGJ events help the Ubuntu community and Ubuntu?

The results of previous UGJs have typically meant about 4000-5000 translated messages for us which is amazing for one day. Good translation coverage helps to grow Ubuntu usage in Slovenia. We have also managed to report a couple of bugs which improved overall quality. More importantly, in average about 15 people attend our global jam, so we meet and hang out with people we usually only see online. This vastly improves team cohesiveness. In addition there are always some newcomers, which is fantastic for community growth. Also, it’s fun .

Join the party by registering your event at the Ubuntu LoCo Portal!

Help translating the LoCo Teams Best Practices and Guidelines

Hi all,

It’s translations announcements day today!

We’ve got some more content that would be very interesting for LoCos to have translated. Check this out:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines

The Ubuntu LoCo Council developed a series of best practices and guidelines to help all LoCos to be more successful, and it would be awesome to have it in YOUR language to allow everyone contribute making your LoCo rock even harder.

Here’s how you can help:

• Add your language and a link to the page where you want to put the translation to the table on top of   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines. I’ve added some few languages already for your convenience, and some folks have even already started translating!
• I recommend creating a subpage named after the two-letter or threee-letter code for your language (e.g. LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/de for German). You’ll find a list of codes here.
• Copy the content of the page in English to your new page
• Translate!
• Save your translation and you’re done

Check out the Spanish or Italian translations for an example:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/es
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamsBestPracticesandGuidelines/it

Thanks!

The Ubuntu LoCo Directory wants to speak your language

Hi all,

The Loco Directory hackers have asked for some more help in getting the directory translated and thus more usable for your Ubuntu LoCo.

You can contribute to it the usual way by going to:

https://translations.launchpad.net/loco-directory

And leaving your suggestions or translations there.

We’ve got 7 languages which are nearly completed, and it would really be awesome if also Catalan, Finnish, French, Czech, Asturian, Serbian, Bengali, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, English (United Kingdom), Dutch, Swedish, Galician, Hebrew, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Vietnamese, Irish, Thai, Arabic, Tamil, Turkish, Welsh, Portuguese, Slovak, Polish, Persian, Danish, Belarusian, and more! would get some translation love.

The LoCo Directory has continuous releases, although there are generally not big string changes, so remember to check it out and translate new strings from time to time.

Thanks!

Ubuntu Lucid release party in Valencia

Last weekend the Catalan LoCo team reunited again to celebrate yet another unforgettable Ubuntu release party in València, at the emblematic Octubre Culture Centre in the heart of the city.

They were two days packed with activities, presentations, conferences, unconferences, installs, excellent food and even better company. In summary, good fun for everyone, of which here’s just a taste:

Day 0: Friday – the ubuntaires are coming

As most of the LoCo team members come from different parts of the Catalonia region, they were traveling on Friday to be fresh for the big day on Saturday. Be it with car, train or motorbike, everyone had arrived by the evening and some of us met for a nice  dinner and enjoyed the warm Valencian night.

Apart from seeing the crew again, the highlight for me was to finally meet the great Cubells and Giorgio in person, with whom I collaborate online, but never had the chance to hang out with yet.

Day 1: Saturday – octubre, install, conferences, random number generators, 61

The first day started early in the morning, and those who managed to wake up soon enough were able to leave their testimonial in the early bird photo. The first thing we all contemplated in awe was the venue:

The current building is a reform from the 1879 original, and the adaptation in 2004 nicely marries the contemporary needs with the original style. The Centre itself and the organizations it is home to are a reference when talking about culture in the Valencian Community, and I think I can speak for the whole team in thanking Vicent Cubells for making the Lucid release party in L’octubre possible.

Moving on to more geeky matters, the party kicked off with Alex‘s presentation and the Maverick UDS video, with obligatory cheer when the picture with the Catalan team was featured. After that, workshops, presentations and the install party were ready to roll, many of them running in parallel.

Later lunch, short break, back to more awesome sessions and a final draw in which number 61 was repeatedly featured in our “random” number generator. Then fast forward to a well-deserved after work beer, a nice dinner in the city, some er… hacking, and last drinks.

Day 2: Sunday – unconference, 太極拳, cava

As it is to expect with a Sunday morning, the last day started slower than the first, but Alex and Rafael managed to quickly sort that out by energizing everyone with cool topics for the unconference, to which people responded equally well volunteering for presentations.

While all interesting, the ones I would personally highlight were the ones from Josep Gallart, in which he explained the golden ratio applied to photography, and the session on Tai Chi at the terrace by Rafael Carreras, which constituted a very nice and pleasant finale.

Following that, we all went for dinner, enjoyed good food at L’octubre once more and were kindly invited to cava by Giorgio’s parents. That marked the closure of the event, after which people started the long journey back home, thinking already on how to make the next release party even more awesome.

Everything was very well documented by our very own reporters, and it seems that everyone took pictures, pictures, pictures, pictures, pictures and pictures.

Thanks to everyone and see you all soon!

UPDATE: I forgot to add that you can also read a report in Catalan from Sisco’s blog post

The pictures in this post are Copyright (c) 2010 all rights reserved to crazyserver, Copyright (c) 2008 all rights reserved octubre and

http://picasaweb.google.com/josepgallart/FestaLucyda# / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Translate the main LoCo Council page

I’ve been working with Laura Czajkowski to set up the main LoCo Council page for translations on the wiki, and I’m pleased to announce that you can start translating it to your own language, so that it is also useful for everyone in your LoCo whose mother tongue is not English:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil

The LoCo Council is at the heart of the governance of the Ubuntu LoCo community, and with such a diverse community as ours, it just makes sense to reflect this diversity in a set of translations for everyone.

Here’s how you can translate the LoCo Council page to your language:

• Add your language and a link to the page where you want to put the translation to the table on top of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil I’ve added some few languages already for your convenience.
• I recommend creating a subpage named after the two-letter or threee-letter code for your language (e.g. LoCoCouncil/th for Thai).
• Copy the content of the original English page to your new page
• Translate!
• Save your translation and you’re done

I’ve also created the Catalan translation to give you an example:

Remember that we’ve got other LoCo Council pages which can be translated. In particular the LoCo team reapproval one would be quite interesting to have available in everyone’s own language to read:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamReApproval

Thanks!