O pasado xoves 28 de abril foi un día maravilloso para toda a comunidade GNOME de Galicia. Xa que celebramos a Festa de Lanzamento de GNOME 3. O evento foi organizado maxistralmente pola asociación Ghandalf en colaboración coas asociaciónsGpul e Trasno, e co apoio económico da Xunta de Galiza.

As nosas espectatívas de asistencia vironse sobrepasadas. Fomos perto de 50 persoas desfrutando da festa, todos moi ilusionados xa que tanto desenvolvedores que alí estaban presentes, moitos deles da empresa Igalia, como tradutores do GNOME ao galego traballamos moi duramente nos últimos meses para poder ter un GNOME 3 resplandecente.

Unha mistura dun evento totalmente planificado coa expontaneidade xeral dunha festa, o trascurso da mesma foi ameno e moi bó. Todo estaba no seu lugar namentres os poñentes e os asistentes dialogaban segundo avanzaba. Foi unha alegría ver de novo xa grandes amigos meus do Software Libre, e non me cansei de darlles as grazas pola súa asistencia xa que coido que para todos era un momento especial logo do inmenso traballo que levou chegar a onde chegamos. Read the rest of this entry »

This Wednesday, November 24th, we made a lecture at the University of Coruña to tech and linguistic people, related with the projects that our galician opensource community are managing and what are their states, and for the other hand how to improve translations by using different techniques we are currently applying in GNOME and Ubuntu.

This lecture was part of two weeks of course, where the more proficient people of open source community of Galicia have explained how they work and how anyone could colaborate with them doing tasks as translations, managing projects or reviewing.
You can find more information about all the lectures at the webpage of Trasno Association[in galician]. This course was sponsorized by our regional gobernment (Xunta de Galicia).

These are our 5 presentations for the lecture, but you can read them at slideshare [in galician]:

Read the rest of this entry »

There are some actions you can perform to achieve if you can get back disk space in your Debian/Ubuntu based box. Most packages contain files that aren’t necessary. For example, UI and documentation translations in languages you don’t use. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get rid of them and get back a few megabytes? Well, since dpkg 1.15.8 you can.

dpkg has two options --path-include=glob-pattern and --path-exclude=glob-pattern that filter what files are installed or not. You can get the format of the pattern from the glob man page: glob(7).

But this just works if you issue dpkg command from the shell but not if you are using apt or aptitude. So the best way to use them is to write them down in a file in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/.

A comon usage is: first exclude a directory and then re-include parts of that directory that you want to keep. For example if you want to delete gettext translations and translated manual pages except Galician, you could write down this in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/excludes:

# Delete locales except Galician
path-exclude=/usr/share/locale/*
path-include=/usr/share/locale/gl/*
path-include=/usr/share/locale/locale.alias

# Delete translated man pages except Galician
path-exclude=/usr/share/man/*
path-include=/usr/share/man/man[1-9]/*
path-include=/usr/share/man/gl*/*

This rules will apply to packages you will install/upgrade from now, but if you want to save space immediately, you have to reinstall all the packages in your system.

aptitude reinstall

or

apt-get --reinstall install

NOTE:
Concerning locale deleting you can get the same results by using localepurge. But this tool is strongly discouraged because this tool is a hack which is *not* integrated with Debian’s package management system and therefore is not for the faint of heart (other examples of tools that is strongly disacouraged are: dpkg-repack, reportbug, etc). Responsibility for its usage and possible breakage of your system therefore lies in the sysadmin’s hands.

NOTE 2:
The package management system on Linux makes installing and upgrading software a snap, but it also caches every package in a local folder in case it’s needed again. Here’s how to clear that cache and save loads of drive space.

sudo apt-get clean

Mabishu has been working and managing GNOME translations for Galician language, and this Saturday, October 16th, we are going to make a speech about our experiences in translation and coordination with this amazing community. This event is sponsorized by Mabishu Studio, OpenHost and our regional gobernment (Xunta de Galicia).

These are the slides for the speech and you can read it at slideshare [in galician]: