> Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: > > * There were no postings from people who do not know Hebrew. I think > > there used to be quite a few. Have all of them left the list > > recently for political or other irrelevant reasons? I hope not. > > I stayed silent because it was a holiday. From sundown on Thursday to > Sundown on Saturday I was offline.I checked my personal email Several > times on Thursday and last night, but not my "work" email. To me reading > this list is part of work, and I have to do this 9 hours a day 5 days > a week, often more. That's enough.
And holidays here until (and including) Monday. I personally would have significantly more trouble reading the list in hebrew than in english. I would however fully understand if the list was in the majority in hebrew. It's after all the language most of you speak natively. Who knows, maybe it would even help me to freshen up my hebrew (which really doesn't get a lot of training in the last three years) ;-) > > * There is a small (but larger) group of people who promote Hebrew on > > linux-il on the patriotic grounds that "Swedes do it, Finns do it". > > No they don't. They have No, ZERO, NADA, ZIP, efes, Hebrew on their lists. > And have you ever looked at their lists? How much Swedish, Finnish, etc > do the have on them? I'll bet all the really juicy questions are in English > or if not, could be understood by an English speaker. I can say that german lists are 95-99% in German, Norwegian lists (as the country is a bit smaller) might have a slightly lower number, but nevertheless it's the vast majority. > > * There seems to be a consensus that technically we are not there yet, > > especially where writing Hebrew is concerned. This is where I think > > the most important point is. > > All I know is that Windows support for Hebrew is there and it works well > out of the box. This is a good thing for people that want to use Hebrew, > becasue they don't have to spend any time adding Hebrew. Especially those > that use compouters as a tool, not as a toy, learning experience, etc. > > I think fighting Microsoft is a bad thing. They've already won "the hearts > and minds" of the Hebrew computer using masses. Honestly I think by now hebrew support on Linux is not far behind. Sure, if you insist on using command line/console apps from 91, you're out of luck, but the same applies to old DOS apps. Ever tried if the windows command shell supports hebrew? Hebrew on Windows is no problem because _everyone_ uses GUI applications, which are properly localized and people have at some point moved away from 10 year old mail clients. By now a lot of GUI apps on Linux have proper Hebrew support. Mozilla has, openoffice (ok, the word processor only) since a few days, KDE3 has with few exceptions, Gtk2 has. So as long as you don't insist on using console applications for things that involve hebrew language, a recent linux distribution (as SuSE 8.0) will more or less work out of the box. There are rough edges but things are usable. I've said this already on the list and I'll repeat it. If you want real hebrew support on Linux, go and help working on it. Clean up the rough edges, get yourself involved in projects as Mozilla, KDE, Gnome. As long as there are so few (almost none in case of KDE) native hebrew speaking developer (that also dares to touch code) participating, the situation will never be as good as with windows. Cheers, Lars ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
