Macedonia Deploys 5,000 Ubuntu Desktops in Schools

vladoboss writes "The latest GNOME Journal is running a story about the deployment of 5000 Ubuntu desktops in public schools. The Republic of Macedonia is a small country in Southern Europe with a population of around 2 million. Internet penetration is only around 5% and software piracy rate is rampant. Also, the government does not play any major role in the development of the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and a private sector is dominated by Microsoft technologies. Given the circumstances, one would not expect any free software related stories to make the headlines. Yet the presence of a small volunteer organization by the name Free Software Macedonia is making a big difference in this small country."

Comments

Office Apps

[fembots]

The friendly article didn't say it, but I assumed these schools will be using OO.o, not MS Office on WINE?

This is a strong movement because children tend to come back home and fiddle with home PCs (like installing games/trojans), so it's now more likely that more Macedonian homes will be running Linux too.

What I am not sure is the career future of these children of the future. Will they be better off in their career now that they are primed with OpenSource ideas, will they become the valuable elites in "knowledge-based exports" market, or will they be forced to re-learn MS once they enter workfoce?

Re:Office Apps

[HUADPE]

As a former user of Ubuntu, I can confirm that it comes bundled with OO.O pre-installed. The problem with Ubuntu is that new installations and setup require you to leave the GUI (graphical user interface) and go into the root editor. In theory this is not required, but in order to gain functionality it is. I'm worried that when it comes down to implementation, the Ubuntu install will not work very well in the long term, as highly skilled technicians will be needed to upgrade the software, thereby raising the cost.

Re:Office Apps

[makapuf]

First, as you read in the news, very few people have a PC, so I'm not sure having a PC at home for kids will be that common.

Then, knowing "linux" instead of "windows" does not mean anything. I guess there is more difference between windows95 and vista or between kde and gnome (which is what they would see) than xp/gnome or xp/kde.

And there are custom themes to reduce this look&feel difference.

Re:Office Apps

[rolfwind]

Unless you are programming or "forced" to deal with the command line (not likely), I don't see much major relearing going on moving from Linux to MS or the other way around when it comes to office apps (OO to MSOffice or the other way around) - it's mostly point and click with similiar interfaces. Also learning to use the web (since they have low internet penetration), which is pretty much the same experience for any GUI system.

Sometimes there is more relearning between versions of an App than there is between two different apps that serve the same purpose.

The other thing I imagine they can use is educational software - I should check the article if they deployed Ubuntu or Edubuntu.

I wonder if the free educational software in the OS world could provide schools lots of savings?

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you're referring to the apt-get package management tool when you say that you must use the CLI to upgrade packages. Are you not aware of Synaptic, KPackage, Adept, and other graphical and easy-to-use frontends for apt-get? I believe Ubuntu even has it's own 'update-manager' program used specificically for upgrading packages (as opposed to general package management).

Also, I didn't RTFM, but I would imagine this 'Free Software Macedonia' group mentioned in the blurb will be providing them whatever trivial support they require. I don't see why the rollout wouldn't succeed.

Re:Office Apps

[Pantero Blanco]

Huh? The only time I had to go to a CLI in an Ubuntu installation was once when the computer had some oddball hardware. Nine times (or more) out of ten, Ubuntu installs and runs without a hitch.

Re:Office Apps

[tsmithnj]

37.5% of them won't have to re-learn anything, because that is their unemployment rate. (SOurce-CIA Factbook:http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factb ook/geos/mk.html)

Perhaps free software will create jobs. The opportunity is certainly there.

Re:Office Apps

[lpcustom]

I fear that these Macedonian kids are going to grow up with higher intellects than people who post on slashdot explaining what a GUI is and using terms like "root editor". Who knows, these kids may actually grow up to be "highly skilled technicians". It's a lot better than dumbed down power users with no idea what they are talking about.
I mean seriously, American children should have more of this. Challenge them. I sound like my dad but kids these days spend more time BS'ing about what they don't know instead of actually learning it. I feel sorry for my country. We put so much effort into convincing our kids how great our country is and how smart they are for being able to turn on a computer. We should be teaching them skills that will enable them to compete in the world. I say good for Macedonian.

Re:Office Apps

[HUADPE]

I'm sorry if I offended you by defining an acronym.

Re:Office Apps

[lpcustom]

This is slashdot man. News for nerds. Most if not all nerds know what a GUI is. It just baffles me when people feel like they have to "define an acronym" to make themselves look smarter, especially "GUI". I mean who are you trying to impress? Oh and mods I know this will be modded flamebait but geez!

Re:Office Apps

[vertinox]

What I am not sure is the career future of these children of the future.

Well they can learn how to flameware with Greeks on the net about the name of the country and learn how to avoid getting shot by Serbs by playing Quake.

Re:Office Apps

[Red Alastor]

If I hadn't wasted my last mod point this morning, I'd mod you insightful.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm.

As a Serb I must protest on the stereotype you just showed. I am sorry, I never shot anyone, so please try not to generalize.

We are portrated as a eavil guys for long enough.

I know you tried to make a joke, but I did not find it funny.

Re:Office Apps

[sapo916]

As a Bosnian Muslim I would also have to agree to with you.

Re:Office Apps

[nkrgovic]

Well they can learn how to flameware with Greeks on the net about the name of the country and learn how to avoid getting shot by Serbs by playing Quake.

Hate to dissapoint you, but Macedonia (FYROM is the officialname, ask the Greeks why) seceded from what is now Serbia and Montenegro peacefully. We are still in good relations, and no side ever fired a single non-FPS shot on each other :). I do think we pwn them in Enemy Territory tough :).

They are, unfortunately, being killed, constantly, but by Albanian separatists. They were promissed help by the U.S. , but since they have no oil they got nothing. Most of Macedonians still live in fear of Albanian terorists, who rampage, kill people, raid vilages and bomb cities allmost every few days.

The only ones the U.S. helped there are the Albanians. Islamic extremist and terorists are allways welcome in Europe, by the U.S., especially when they have drugs money to pay for CIA instructors.

Re:Office Apps

[Wylfing]

They are, unfortunately, being killed, constantly, but by Albanian separatists.

Albanians!

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

oh... MACEDONIA!! i really care about macedonia!!! hey, granolaheads, i run linux in my backyard.

Re:Office Apps

[utnow]

trivial support? for a linux desktop pc? lol

Linux development is BUILT on providing support. I'm convinced that keeping the whole thing confusing and back-ass-ward is the thing driving the support-based business model. I mean... without delving too deep into the details... let's just look at the names chosen for software.

The current topic is application/package updating... you mentioned 'Synaptic' 'KPackage' 'Adept' and 'apt-get'...

Now... These programs are probably wonderful for what they do. I'm sure that they're useful, secure, lightweight, etc, etc. But all of the engineering in the world can't save a system if the human interface people goto sleep. How would any person (who doesn't already know) know to run 'Adept' to upgrade their software? or 'Synaptic'? or before all of this GUI stuff, 'apt-get'? Especially when anyone switching from Windows or OSX is accustomed to a system that allows them to install programs by double clicking on a 'install' file on their desktop.

I know as well as the next guy that there's a fun 'secret-club' mentality to the OSS crowd. It really seems as though most software names are chosen to be intentionally missleading (or random as hell). Clever names that don't give a clue as to the nature of the program don't enhance the software. They detract from it. There are a few things that could be learned from MS/Apple... (what? most everything else has already been stolen... and re-stolen. There's a reason your KDE/Gnome desktop has an application menu in the bottom-left corner... not all of you... but i'm sure most lol. It's the default afterall.)

Apple -> System Update
Microsoft -> Automatic Update
Open Source Community -> apt-get

I'm just sayin... a 'bit' more transparency would be a nice thing. ;)

Re:Office Apps

[penguinoid]

I wonder if the free educational software in the OS world could provide schools lots of savings?

IIRC, both Apple and Microsoft really really really want schools using their software. Microsoft moreso, as they can provide their software only (free to them, but they might still charge) whereas Apple is still glued to hardware.

Re:Office Apps

[dwillden]

I was stationed with the US Army in your beautiful little country in 2001 when the NLA tried to spread the Kosovo Fighting into Macedonia. Unlike most troops there I had a job that allowed and even required me to travel around your country extensively rather than remaining stuck on Camp Able Sentry or limited to the supply route to Kosovo

The US did not then and has not since supported any Albanian terrorists or even seperatists who were operating, or who even wanted to operate in Macedonia. We really haven't even supported those so inclined who live and operate in Kosovo, since we entered into Kosvo, if anything most of our effort is spent protecting Serbs from harassment and discrimination. We supported the Lawfully elected Macedonian Government (though we did encourage a few reformations to reduce the discrimination the Albanian minority thought it was suffereing, sometimes truthfully sometimes not.)

The funniest thing about that entire Insurgency/Civil War/Call it what you will, is that the entire time the NLA was certain that any day we were going to start helping them either actively with troops, or with weapons or supplies. But we never did. The US always supported the government, mostly with monetary aid.

Your accusation at the end of your post is unfounded and uncalled for. Although not really unexpected. Most the time we were there we were constantly being asked if the US still hated the Serbs. Which of course we the US never did, we just hated what some of them had been doing to Kosovars, and what they had done to non-Serbian Bosnians and Croats.

As to supporting Macedonians, we've had troops in Macedonia since it declared independance and asked for UN Peacekeepers to keep Serbia from trying anything like it did when other states broke off from Yugoslavia. We joined that mission and supported it until the Kosovo War. We transitioned our base to be the rear support base for our main force in Kosovo. We remained there until a couple years ago when we moved those support personnel up to Pristina in Kosovo.

Since the day The Republic of Macedonia (I heartily disagree with the politcally correct FYROM) declared independence, the US has supported the it and it's lawfully elected Government, and thus the majority of the people. We have supported your troops and police. We poured tons of money into your economy, and we definatly did not help the NLA or any follow-on groups.

Oh and as to the original article, yea Piracy is big there, I myself brought home a few disks with software and music on them. Hey, they were cheap and it poured some money into the economy. Oh, and on a non-piracy note, my wife really likes the custom tailored tux I got there that I wore on our wedding day. $100 (US) for a hand tailored Tux, awsome for a really skinny guy like me who has trouble finding clothes that fit.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

"How would any person (who doesn't already know) know to run 'Adept' to upgrade their software? or 'Synaptic'? or before all of this GUI stuff, 'apt-get'?"

We're talking about Ubuntu, and that has a very simple pop-up software update notifier. You CAN use apt-get instead, but it's not nessecary. No arcane mystery.

"There's a reason your KDE/Gnome desktop has an application menu in the bottom-left corner ...i'm sure most lol. It's the default afterall."

If you had even used Gnome you would know the default spot for the application menu is on the top left.

Re:Office Apps

[ddimas]

Since the day The Republic of Macedonia (I heartily disagree with the politcally correct FYROM) declared independence, the US has supported the it and it's lawfully elected Government, and thus the majority of the people. We have supported your troops and police. We poured tons of money into your economy, and we definatly did not help the NLA or any follow-on groups.

It's not a matter of political correctness. It's a matter of a Serbian nation making territorial demands in Greece. How would you like it if Canada renamed southern Quebec 'New York' and started making territorial claims on New York state?

Vlakas Amerikanos.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Im from eastern europe and must say that problem is with localization and fonts, you just cant set it from GUI, and for begginer it can be too difficult (locales, fonts with our letters, must be setup in both shell and xserver)

Re:Office Apps

[glitch23]

We put so much effort into convincing our kids how great our country is and how smart they are for being able to turn on a computer.

If only we could teach their parents how to turn on the computer we'd be set; oh, and setting the clock on the VCR.

Re:Office Apps

[themadplasterer]

How is it that this is funny? Would it be funny if you substituted it with Jews and Germans? I'll never understand the mods

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

You married in a penguin suit???! :-)

Re:Office Apps

[ipapadop]

How would you like the residents of another country declared their territory "Texas" or "Indiana"? That's what is going on between Greeks and the residents of FYROM. A large part of Northern Greece is called Macedonia (pronounced Makedonia in Greek)... Would it have to be renamed??? If I say I am a Greek and I live in Macedonia, what would you understand? That I live in Northern Greece or that I live in FYROM?

Re:Office Apps

[hdparm]

WTF are you talking about? Macedonia, or as you would obviously prefer it, FYROM is an independent country, geographically located just between Serbia and Greece. What would their name or territorial claims have to do with Serbia?

BTW, yes Macedonian page clearly states that the OO.org 2.0 has been finally fully localised - kids will use their native language in Office Apps.

Re:Office Apps

[natrius]

Macedonia (FYROM is the officialname, ask the Greeks why)

For those curious enough as I was, this is why.

Re:Office Apps

[steeviant]

Why you haven't been modded as a troll is beyond me, it's clear that you have no idea what you're talking about and you're just trying to stir up a hornets nest of replies. Anyway, here's some help for those moderating your drivel.

"Linux development is BUILT on providing support. I'm convinced that keeping the whole thing confusing and back-ass-ward is the thing driving the support-based business model. I mean... without delving too deep into the details... let's just look at the names chosen for software.

The current topic is application/package updating... you mentioned 'Synaptic' 'KPackage' 'Adept' and 'apt-get'...

Now... These programs are probably wonderful for what they do. I'm sure that they're useful, secure, lightweight, etc, etc. But all of the engineering in the world can't save a system if the human interface people goto sleep. How would any person (who doesn't already know) know to run 'Adept' to upgrade their software? or 'Synaptic'? or before all of this GUI stuff, 'apt-get'? Especially when anyone switching from Windows or OSX is accustomed to a system that allows them to install programs by double clicking on a 'install' file on their desktop."

Those who use OS X are used to dragging applications into the /Applications directory as a matter of fact, Windows users are used to the Next,Next,Next,Finish method, and Linux users are used to installing applications via a package manager built into their distribution of choice. They are different operating systems with different methods of installing software. No surprises there.

In Ubuntu, the apt front end Synaptic is described in the menu as "Synaptic Package Manager", there's also another (easier) front end to apt get is included, called "Add Applications". I can see how that might be confusing for people who have trouble reading, but it seems pretty obvious to me.

As you so rightly point out, simple, intuitive labling of applications seems to be the accepted route to making things a little easier on the users, and that's (unsurprisingly) the way that Ubuntu has gone.

"I know as well as the next guy that there's a fun 'secret-club' mentality to the OSS crowd. It really seems as though most software names are chosen to be intentionally missleading (or random as hell). Clever names that don't give a clue as to the nature of the program don't enhance the software. They detract from it. There are a few things that could be learned from MS/Apple... (what? most everything else has already been stolen... and re-stolen. There's a reason your KDE/Gnome desktop has an application menu in the bottom-left corner... not all of you... but i'm sure most lol. It's the default afterall.)
"

So the gist of your rant is that some Linux programs are badly named because their names don't describe their purpose? Yeah because Oracle, PowerPoint, Visio and Quicken are really obvious names that describe exactly what you're getting right?

You're acting like a buffoon, you can't expect to migrate to another operating system and instantly know the name of every application you need, programs aren't named "File Manager" and "Word Processor" because you'd run out of names pretty damn quick. Any operating system requires you to learn about it before you can use it effectively, and one of the things you need to learn is what applications do what, and which of the 10 zillion applications out there that do the same thing fits best with your workflow. You can't expect all of them to be called the same thing, but expecting them to be clearly labelled in the Applications menu isn't unreasonable. Nor, however is it uncommon, especially on Ubuntu.

One more thing... Ubuntu (like most other GNOME based distros) puts the Applications menu in the top left by default, not the bottom left. Perhaps you might want to try actually using Ubuntu before you criticize it with complaints that just don't apply.

"Apple -> System Update
Microsoft -> Automatic Update
Open Source Community

Re:Office Apps

[dvNull]

After installing Ubunu I have had to use the CLI for the following reasons:
1. To compile ndiswrapper for my wireless card
2. To install the official ATI drivers
3. To use vim

I'm very impressed by the polish of the Ubuntu distribution and will recommend it to others :)

Re:Office Apps

[steeviant]

"You married in a penguin suit???! :-)"

Yeah some of these Linux geeks are pretty dedicated.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

How would you like the residents of another country declared their territory "Texas" or "Indiana"?

Or "Mexico".

Re:Office Apps

[genckas]

Sorry to burst your bubble but Macedonians and Albanians are getting along quite well. Rading villages, bomb cities etc, dunno where you heard that since it never happened. Its worthless talking politics with brainwashed individuals. P.S. Albanians are not only muslim, also Catholoc, Orthodox Christian and Jewish, something you might never understand.

Re:Office Apps

[Raphael]

[...] Clever names that don't give a clue as to the nature of the program don't enhance the software. [...]

Apple -> System Update
Microsoft -> Automatic Update
Open Source Community -> apt-get

Nice troll... I suppose that you never took the time to use Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution running Gnome.

The name of the program that you use for performing a given task does not matter much, except if you want to run it from the command line. But most users will access these programs from the menu. So what do I see on my desktop? In the sub-menu "Administration", I see an entry "Synaptic Package Manager". If I leave the mouse pointer for one second over this menu entry, I see the description "Install, remove and upgrade software packages". This is easy to understand, and this is what the users care about.

If you want to run programs from the command line, then you may be interested in knowing that the package manager is called "synaptic". To compare this with Windows, you would have to know that the control panel is called "control.exe" and know the name of the specific control panel applet that you want to start. This is not very different.

Re:Office Apps

[Dot.Com.CEO]

It is not your lack of knowledge of history and international affairs that annoys me, it is your insistance on having an opinion even though you don't understand the subject.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, it is official now: please mod parent(vertinox) post flamebait, on the grounds of an actual flamewar.

Re:Office Apps

[zecg]

Didn't the MS's "Champagne" commercial for XBox teach you ANYTHING?

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

I greatly respect the Greek but I'm afraid they're just being silly with this. You don't see for example the Iranians getting all pissed of about the Former Soviet Repubic of Azerbaijan.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Serb I have to admit, you have just discovered our evil consipracy plan.
This is not about Linux or Ubuntu. This is about us trying to invade Greece (among other countries on this planet and in universe), and to ... don't know what... maybe install Linux on all your computers and make you type in black console (horror!).

Get a life.

Re:Office Apps

[ddimas]

WTF are you talking about? Macedonia, or as you would obviously prefer it, FYROM is an independent country, geographically located just between Serbia and Greece. What would their name or territorial claims have to do with Serbia?

They are a Bulgarian (dialect) speaking sub-population of old Serbia. The ethnic composition is nearly 100% Slav or Albanian. They are no more Macedonian than Queen Elizabeth I. Certain Pakistanis have a better claim on calling themselves Macedonians than those people, as they are decended from Alexander the Great's soldiers and ACTUALLY SPEAK THE ANCIENT GREEK DIALECT!

Macedonians are a Greek speaking people of ancient hertiage, they are mainly concentrated in NW Greece, southern Bulgaria, and Albania. Oh yes, a small portion of them live in the southern parts of the Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia. Their cultural center is the port city of Thessalonika, and that city is what this is about.

Re:Office Apps

[mahmud]

It would be false analogy, since people in Yugoslavia have been fucking each other in the ass, with no side being the pure evil and no side being pure good. Certainly, the Serbs, managed to do more trouble, but that's just because there's more of them.

The Jews in Germany, on the other hand, were just doing business and living their lives. That is until Germans decided to vent their inferiority complex on the Jews.

Furthermore, Yugoslav economy was in a very nice state before 1990, so their behaviour is even less understandable.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, nobody bothered to fact check the article or follow up on recent events.

I won't bother you with all the details, but what happened was a group effort of the Macedonian government, the Peoples Republic of China, USAID and Microsoft. Open source software was installed on SOME machines initially as a stop gap measure until the donations, money and resources could come together to rebuild the infrastructure. The end result is that Windows XP, and Microsoft Office were installed in all schools and on 6,000 computers donated by the PRC.

You can read more on the USAID site.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

What like the former Soviet Republic of Georgia? Yep it sure is annoying to have to figure out which Georgia someone is from. My Trig Prof had me so confused over just that issue. He claimed to be from Georgia but his accent was definately not a southern drawl. I was sooo confused.

Or as someone else mentioned how do we deal with the fact that we are not the only Americans on the planet as there are actually several other countries that exist on the American continents. Heck we're not even the only United States on this continent. Mexico uses that name as well.

But then the Greeks are known for their hopeless, endless, international disputes which distract them from their NATO obligations (Not that Turkey isn't also at fault on that issue).

Oops I'm feeding the trolls. Bye

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

a part of Bulgaria is also called Makedonia, but that didn't stop us to be one of the first to recognize Macedonia as a country. But if you say now, or 50 years before that you lived in Makedonia, do you think people would know that you are actually Greek? Basically, Macedonians are doing the same as the citizens of the US, declaring that their nation has the same name as a place (Makedonia and America), but in the end, no one seems to care. National identity is what counts.

Re:Office Apps

[utnow]

yeah... tried installing it once and it just hung on the install (from the CD... which they sent me).

Aside from the single point about gnome's Start Menu being in the TOP left instead of the bottom left which was honestly quite trivial to my point you managed to be rather rude. congrats.

It's clear that you have no idea what you're talking about and you're just trying to stir up a hornets nest of replies. Anyway, here's some help for those moderating your drivel.

I was quite polite if I do say so myself. My 2cents is that the linux community (the OSS community even) as a whole is going to need to adopt more transparent names for their packages if they have any designs on desktop adoption. I think ubuntu is a step in the right direction, but they aren't there yet.

You folks can't handle critisim at ALL can you? Especially since you probably didn't write it. lol

and FYI: quicken, powerpoint, and the like can get by with missleading names because they are backed by huge advertising campaigns. The companies have done their best to make the name synonymous with the purpose. Google would have been a poor name too if not for the advertising (though it got some attentiong from being a mystery).

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

black consoles are sooo 20th century. Transparent shading alone should be enough to convert to teh linux!

Re:Office Apps

[steeviant]

"yeah... tried installing it once and it just hung on the install (from the CD... which they sent me)."

So you've never actually used Ubuntu, yet you're making assumptions about how it works? This was precisely my point in the previous message. What right have you to make a whole lot of baseless assertions about an operating system that you've never even used?

"Aside from the single point about gnome's Start Menu being in the TOP left instead of the bottom left which was honestly quite trivial to my point you managed to be rather rude. congrats."

I think it's very rude to dismiss someone elses product that by your own admission you've never even used. The point I was trying to make was that you don't know what you're talking about, and so therefore should keep your opinions to yourself lest you avoid upsetting people by making a whole bunch of baseless assertions about things which you have no idea about.

You must also have memory problems if you've forgotten that you were trying to say that it was difficult to install packages in Ubuntu (it isn't) that there was no easy update tool as in OS X and Windows (there is), that programs are poorly named (maybe they are, but it's not exclusive to Linux by any means).

"I was quite polite if I do say so myself. My 2cents is that the linux community (the OSS community even) as a whole is going to need to adopt more transparent names for their packages if they have any designs on desktop adoption. I think ubuntu is a step in the right direction, but they aren't there yet."

I'm sorry, but I don't feel it's polite to tell a whole lot of lies about Ubuntu. Now it's a "step in the right direction"? How would you know? You still haven't learned. Stop making assertions about a distribution you haven't used.

"You folks can't handle critisim at ALL can you? Especially since you probably didn't write it. lol"

I can't handle it when I see someone who clearly has no clue criticising something that they've never used for problems it doesn't have.

I'm not sure whether you're trying to say that I didn't write my own reply, or didn't write Ubuntu, either way that wouldn't excuse you from being an uninformed idiot spouting crap about something he doesn't know about.

"and FYI: quicken, powerpoint, and the like can get by with missleading names because they are backed by huge advertising campaigns. The companies have done their best to make the name synonymous with the purpose. Google would have been a poor name too if not for the advertising (though it got some attentiong from being a mystery)."

Oh, so non-obvious names are okay as long as you have a whole lot of money to spend on advertising, but not when you're giving the software away for free?

Believe me, having obvious names has fuck all to do with usability, you manage to remember your friends and family without a massive advertising and without them having to be named "Guy with orange hair and freckles who drinks a lot" and "Old lady who spawned you".

Re:Office Apps

[utnow]

1. I never said anything about ubuntu. I was talking OSS in general until someone informed me that this thread should be focused on ubuntu. then i stated that i've never tried it because i was unable to install it (not exactly a good sign) but that from what i'd heard it sounded as though it had taken a number of steps that were in the right direction, but like all things it still has room for improvement.

2. I never 'dismissed' anything. I said that a poor name is a big deal because it makes the system more scary for users who aren't accustomed to linux. If the community intends to make headway into the desktop market then they need to convert people, and that means people who aren't used to linux. The program may be great, but a poor name is not a minor detail. My suggestion was not 'dismiss the packages'. Rather it was 'rename them to more descriptive packages so that people will know what they do without needing to have a geek tell them'.

3. Yes. I'm saying that if you want people to use your program, then you either need a namme that describes it's purpose, or alot of money to TELL people it's purpose. If you just want to create software that gets used by a handfull of people then a mystery name is ok. If you want widespread adoption then people need to know what the program does with minimal research (think average attention span).

Finally, you're misinterpreting a suggestion/critisism as a call to burn linux to the ground. In actuality, I'm making a friendly suggestion that I think will help further the cause of reducing MS to rubble. As long as most users (rubes who look for programs like 'System Update') are still scared of linux, they won't use it.

Re:Office Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

yeap! more specifically: Muslim 70%, Albanian Orthodox 20%, Roman Catholic 10% check the cia world fact book on albania.

Re:Office Apps

[steeviant]

"1. I never said anything about ubuntu. I was talking OSS in general until someone informed me that this thread should be focused on ubuntu. then i stated that i've never tried it because i was unable to install it (not exactly a good sign) but that from what i'd heard it sounded as though it had taken a number of steps that were in the right direction, but like all things it still has room for improvement."

If you'd originally said something this reasonable, I wouldn't have responded so rudely. It was because you jumped in and made an ass of yourself by spouting a whole bunch of ill-informed rubbish.

I assumed that you were referring to Ubuntu since that is the distribution referred to in the summary and the article. It seemed reasonable to assume that, and I think you probably should have been more clear in the beginning.

The fact that you couldn't install Linux doesn't have a lot to do with children in Macedonia using Ubuntu in the classroom. Students generally don't have to install an operating system on their computers.

So while that's a bad sign for your computer aptitude, it doesn't have a lot to do with children in the third world using Ubuntu on the computers at school.

"2. I never 'dismissed' anything. I said that a poor name is a big deal because it makes the system more scary for users who aren't accustomed to linux. If the community intends to make headway into the desktop market then they need to convert people, and that means people who aren't used to linux. The program may be great, but a poor name is not a minor detail. My suggestion was not 'dismiss the packages'. Rather it was 'rename them to more descriptive packages so that people will know what they do without needing to have a geek tell them'."

What I was talking about was that you were being dismissive toward open source software because you had not taken the time to become familiar with the applications as you have done with Windows.

You probably felt displaced, and that having to relearn all that stuff was too hard because it made you feel as though the skills and prowess you posess with Windows systems were not transferrable to Linux.

Feeling devalued when you switch to a new environment is common, and without some kind of motivation it can be a hard slog, it's often easier to just give up than start all over again, learning new ways to install applications and navigate the filesystem.

Fortunately, these children are likely not exposed to Windows or only at the most superficial level so they won't have the same feelings of helplessness that a person accustomed to Windows might feel.

Every platform has confusingly named applications, the world is full of them. Most applications, web sites, and operating systems are confusingly named, obviously-named applications are the exception and not the rule. The methods that can be used to alieviate the problem are the same as on any other platform.

"3. Yes. I'm saying that if you want people to use your program, then you either need a namme that describes it's purpose, or alot of money to TELL people it's purpose. If you just want to create software that gets used by a handfull of people then a mystery name is ok. If you want widespread adoption then people need to know what the program does with minimal research (think average attention span)."

I agree completely, but it doesn't neccesarily need to be done in the name of the application. Making things simple is a job for the people who package the software for distribution, and it's something that's done fairly extensively for the applications included in the base install of Ubuntu. After that the applications are installed by the users themselves from the "Add Applications" program, Synaptic or the command line. Good descriptions of all the software in the base repositories are available so that the packages can be identified easily by novice users and discovered by searching for the purpose of the application, not just the name.

"Finally,

But what about the pirates?

[14erCleaner]

Are they adding MP3 support to the base Ubuntu system, to support their local culture of IP piracy?

Re:But what about the pirates?

[BeerStore]

i wonder if your windows key is valid as well....not to mantion that you probably have no mp3s whatsoever...
One of those computers compared to yours probably has no license infractions at all...and yes, illegal mp3s is the most important problem of a country who's been at war for years..

The Article

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the articles quite well written but for the Macedonian deployment I don't see any positive coming out of it. Sure for Macedonia it might be interesting to get a cheap operating system solution specially now after the years of war and the slowly restructuring of their economy open source might be the right way to go.

But I am not sure whether GNOME is the correct choice for the Schools and the demands and requirements that such schools have. The problem I see is that Darko has a personal preference that he says is GNOME and his decision to deploy the schools is based on is personal preference rather to what might be technological a better choice (summed up).

The problems here is GNOME which from my experience as former contributor is far away from being in a state where it fullfils requirements of the schoolars. Specially in the education sector GNOME lacks a lot of useful software as well as in other areas it lacks completenes of these software.

I think also the reasons brought up like "simplicity" and "cleaness" reminds me of the dozens of marketing announces made by GNOME and sounds more like a programmed opinion rather than a real objective opinion of what exists these days.

If we look over to KDE for a moment then I must say that it has by far more to offer specially for schools and education than GNOME. If we happen to have a look at "kdeedu" for example:

http://edu.kde.org/

Then we see a lot of useful programs specially for kids to learn lessons in vocabular training, in percentage calculation, in function plotting, in geography, or chemical stuff. Please note that this is just a value free comment, because it's urgently required to take the best out of the best (a slogan that I learned from the times where I supported GNOME that it's always important to use the best software existing).

Not just that but I also know that KDE is the by far more feature complete and coherent Desktop to accomplish exactly these needs much better and much more efficient than what GNOME has to offer. It simply works and get the pupils their work done.

And this is by far a reply from my side that is miles away from what I really know about GNOME and what really reflects my very personal opinion. Going into details here would probably generate a flamefest with people again which I am trying to avoid since people are inconvinceable.

Though this said. Darko is quite confident that he can generate new "Developers for GNOME". This is quite a honourable wish but personal own experience for many years with myself as person and many others that I known have proven that "generating new Developers for GNOME" and "have those become part of GNOME and fully accepted" are two pair of shoes and knowing their elbow community of developer proves that this will be getting a really rough task and only leads into frustration.

I also question whether that what gets installed is also that what gets used by the pupils or schools later on. Once their infrastructure is getting better, people start to experiment (even pupils at home). That's how we all learned about Linux and I doubt that the 468 schools and some 182 computer labs continue staying with GNOME once they find themselves trap into many problems that they can not solve. I think from the 5000 Desktops that are planned - only half of them will remain with GNOME (in best). The other half will continue piracing Windows or switch to something else. It's also not clear that this project leads into success since there are two sides of a project. One that was successful and the other that was a mistake and failed. Both valid project with different ending.

By the way, it would have been nice to have an official announcement from them. It would be good to read an independant article about this totally free from any value or personal opinion. It's hard for me as reader to track down whether this is a real project or just a well written marketing writing specially set to show a new chess move in the game for the best Desktop.

Anyone has some independant source to confirm this ?

Re:The Article

[MrApples]

I also question whether that what gets installed is also that what gets used by the pupils or schools later on. Once their infrastructure is getting better, people start to experiment (even pupils at home). That's how we all learned about Linux and I doubt that the 468 schools and some 182 computer labs continue staying with GNOME once they find themselves trap into many problems that they can not solve. I think from the 5000 Desktops that are planned - only half of them will remain with GNOME (in best). The other half will continue piracing Windows or switch to something else.

I found Linux because of experimentation yes, but I was only experimenting because of my disgust with Windows. My thought is that if these kids are introduced to Linux before they become acustomed to Windows, they will be much less inclined to switch to Windows after experiencing the (subjective) benefits of Linux.
As for finding themselves trapped in problems, I do not agree. I have done my fair share of deploying Ubuntu for inexperienced Linux users, and it has always turned out well. I feel that both Gnome as a desktop environment and Ubuntu as a distribution are easily mature enough for this scenario.

I hope them the best in their endeavor, and that others follow suit.

Re:The Article

[ndansmith]

Yes, but there are also aspects of KDE which are harmful to education. For instance, konstantly kspelling keverything kwith "K" kannot kbe kood kfor kyoung kstudents.

Re:The Article

[pherthyl]

There's no reason they can't run the KDE Educational packages on Gnome. I'm an avid KDE user, but for schools I would probably also go with Gnome. All the advanced KDE features that I love are completely irrelevant for that target audience. Although KDE's superior lockdown features may be beneficial.

Re:The Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Gthat's gwhy gUbuntu guses Gnome, Gnot kde. Gno gproblem gwith gall gthose gpesky Ks.

Re:The Article

[damsa]

Most kids of the 80s used Apples in schools. Even today a quite sizable number of computers in schools are Apples, and yet Windows thrives.

Re:The Article

[Joey Vegetables]

The Macedonian language uses the phonetic Cyrillic alphabet. Every letter has its own consistent sound and every sound has (more or less, discounting unstressed vowels and voiced/unvoiced consonants in certain places) its own letter.

Re:The Article

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I know what you are sayink!

Poor Kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Of the two Linux desktops:

1) A crappy Win95 ripoff - KDE

2) An even crappier Win95 ripoff - Gnome

the poor kids got number 2...

Re:Poor kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you stupid...Macedonia signed a contract with M$ for their products. And we are trying to correct that mistake...it caused our country over 4 mil. euros and those money mostly went in other pockets...could have been used for other aims..

And please no one from Macedonia or outside, do not reply to the Greek provications so that this article doesn't turn to be another national e-war. Or edit the replies and delete those that are provocating.

Obvious...

[Spy der Mann]

if Microsoft dominates the private sector, how can you expect a small country NOT to have piracy, given Micro$oft'$ a$toni$hing price$ for their $oftware ?

Re:Obvious...

[Pantero Blanco]

That and the fact that their government is probably more concerned with more important things like water and power...if they aren't corrupt. Exce$$ive dollar $ign$ nonwithstanding, I don't think the parent post is a troll.

In Full Battle Array

[3Suns]

All right! only 2000 more to go before we have...

Seven Thousand Macedonian Linux Desktops in Full Battle Array!

As Butthead would say....

[chrstphrb]

"...Internet penetration is only around 5%"

He said penetration... uh, hehe, uh, hehe

Re:As Butthead would say....

[chrstphrb]

Given that Macedonians are mainly of greek descent, and the implications of that fact... I fail to see how this was modded "off-topic".

I think funny would be more in order...

Re:As Butthead would say....

[Dot.Com.CEO]

"Macedonians" are Slavs. Nothing to do with Greeks.

Glad to see...

[DimGeo]

Glad to see our south-western brothers get it right. Nothing better than teaching children to use C++ with KDevelop + QT Designer, and in Ubuntu that setup is always just a few mouse clicks away.

Re:Glad to see...

[lurch_mojoff]

Glad to see our south-western brothers get it right. Nothing better than teaching children to use C++ with KDevelop + QT Designer, and in Ubuntu that setup is always just a few mouse clicks away.

Do you really believe they'll be teaching kids in high-school "to use C++ with KDevelop + QT Designer". If Macedonia's north-eastern "brothers" (and I bet the rest of Macedonia's neighbors) are any indication, the only challenge before the "sysadmins" in those schools will be to keep up with the constant updates of gnomine and sol.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for open source and better computer literacy (and why not even IT, software development, informatics, etc.) education, for it is one of the few things that can potentially drag the country (maybe even the region) out of the economic sticky situation (in one of the posts above was mentioned a 30-something percent unemployment rating), but the only thing this step will achieve is it will save the Macedonian government a couple of gazillion, bibijillion, quantifimfimfimillion dollars for Microsoft software. Thats about all. Cut the wet dreams of hordes of open source developers.

Copyrights, copyrights, copyrights...

[HermanAB]

Due to pressure by large countries to honour patents and copyrights, poor countries are all switching to free software. The strict enforcement of copyrights is the best thing that can ever happen to the Free Software movement and to the poor, it is a godsend.

Re:Copyrights, copyrights, copyrights...

[bogie]

The other best thing is software DRM/activation.

I hope with Vista that there is no Corporate version and that all businesses and consumer had to pay full price and activate immediately upon install. Make Windows and Office impossible to pirate and watch OSS use sky rocket.

Avoid GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.

First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don't serve any corporate needs.

From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn't possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.

As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it's the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.

When looking at this legendary example picture:

http://img234.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screensho t34ji.jpg

You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don't want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view - they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what's wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your "Menus & Toolbars" capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.

It's a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don't support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.

Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need

Re:Avoid GNOME

[ctenet]

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12813& comment_id=66297

Re:Avoid GNOME

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Jeezus, give it a rest will you? How many forums are going to post this crap? Continuing to do ad homien attacks on GNOME is seriously a waste of time.

I wish you'd find a more healthy outlet for this bitterness. This stuff only damages your reputation and no one elses. The image you posted clearly says "Galaxy" so one can probably determine who you are. You could have at least changed the graphic since people already pointed out that it reveals who you are at Osnews.

thanks,
sri

Re:Avoid GNOME

[beisbol]

this guy evidently posts this everywhere:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12813& comment_id=67157
mod troll, please.

Re:Avoid GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

"This stuff only damages your reputation and no one elses."

Sorry clown, it only reinforces what everyone already knows. Gnome is a fucking disaster.

It is a embarrassment for the open source community.

Re:Avoid GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up, dude.

At least it doesn't have it's testicles in TrollTech's vice-grip...

Re:Avoid GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being a dick. All desktops are made up of bits and pieces from different places, why can't you just use the app that makes sense? Install a theme that makes KDE and GNOME applications all look the same, and ignore whether the application you're using is based KDE or WxWindows or pure Gtk2 or pure Qt or GNOME or XFCE and concentrate on whether the application does what you want or not, rather than troubling yourself about the politics of the authors of one component.

Re:Avoid GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, having Qt until the GPL is a real bitch.

Oh wait, you GNOME guys are still clinging to that tired old "Qt isn't Free" thing arn't you? Pathetic.

Educating for a career

[Anonymous Coward]

For a school system to try to keep up-to-date with all the latest software and technological hardware (ie. in the school shops and labs) is almost impossible. The idea is to try to impart generic skills. ie. the students haven't learned the exact skills they need to use product X, but they have learned the generic skills that make it much faster to learn X when they do get on the job.

Mutual Exclusion?

[Pantero Blanco]

How exactly do you have such a high software piracy rate when only 5% of the people have Internet? Yeah, I know people can copy things at home and hand them out or sell them, but it seems like that couldn't spread things fast enough to come close to the rate in other countries.

Re:Mutual Exclusion?

[ajdlinux]

Well, maybe there's a low penetration rate of computers in general: if 10% of people have PCs and 5% have internet, that means 50% of people with computers have the internet.

Re:Mutual Exclusion?

[FinchWorld]

Simple. Local markets. They sell them there, the police don't bother with them for the most part, its pretty much the same as markets in china, all the software you could ever want for a few pennies (or cents).

Re:Mutual Exclusion?

[i.r.id10t]

"Well, see Bill, we haven't actually *sold* anything in Macedonia...."

Re:Mutual Exclusion?

[Anonymous Coward]

CDs. Have you heard of that ancient medium?

Re:Mutual Exclusion?

[drgonzo59]

Simple - all that 5% is used to pirate stuff, which is then sold on outside markets to the other %95. The pirates make money and the rest of the 95% of users of pirated software save money - ($2 for MS Windows as opposed to $200). Win-win situation as far as the Macedonians are concerned.

Re:Mutual Exclusion?

[dwillden]

Actually it's even better than that. The local police requested that the US and other NATO bases report when ever a CD dealer would set up shop in his car outside the gate of a base. Why? Because the guy selling out of his car at the base entrance wasn't paying taxes on his profits.

Whereas we could go into any of the CD shops in town and get the same disks for just a few cents more. Or we could even go onto the NATO Base where there was a CD shop and again pay that same cheap rate. With the exchange rate in 2001 it cost $2.50 per disk and thats how everything was sold, on a per disk basis. A CD with hundreds of MP3's or a direct bootleg of a just released Album, or a copy of the latest version of MS Office or any other software you wanted was just $2.50.

And as to bringing said bootleg CD's home, all Customs cared was that you were not bringing multiple copies of the same product back to try to sell.

Re:Mutual Exclusion?

[jaiyen]

I live in Thailand, and it's easier to get pirated software than the real thing here. Loads and loads of markets, street stalls or computer centers sell CD's full of pirated software for about $4 a time. There's pretty much everything available - Adobe/Macromedia, Oracle, Microsoft, high-end video and audio programs etc.. even 'pirated' Linux distros! It's all the latest versions too, for instance there was copies of the Longhorn beta builds available ages ago. By contrast, real versions of software are either unavailable, slow to arrive and/or expensive (usually quite a bit more than the US price). So believe me that you don't necessarily need a country with a high internet penetration to have a lot of pirated software!

Oh, good grief.

[ScrewMaster]

software piracy rate is rampant

Stop it. Stop it, I say. I can't stand the words "rampant" and "piracy" in the same sentence anymore. And besides, how can a rate be rampant?

Re:Oh, good grief.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a heraldic device. A percent sign standing up, showing it's claws.

Re:Oh, good grief.

[Pantero Blanco]

Picture a large flag with a disc, with the words "COPY THAT FLOPPY!" blazoned across it. :)

Re:Oh, good grief.

[Anonymous Coward]

And besides, how can a rate be rampant?

Rates are rampant all the time at the Department of Redundancy Department.

Re:Oh, good grief.

[AoT]

I much prefer the rate sinister.

Re:Oh, good grief.

[IANAAC]

And besides, how can a rate be rampant?

Well, you could crack a dictionary and find out the actual meaning of the word. And while you're at it, take a look at the etymology. Often, it explains why such a word is used.

Re:Oh, good grief.

[SuprCzr]

rampant
Pronunciation: 'ram-p&nt also -"pant
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, present participle of ramper
1 a : rearing upon the hind legs with forelegs extended b : standing on one hind foot with one foreleg raised above the other and the head in profile -- used of a heraldic animal
2 a : marked by a menacing wildness, extravagance, or absence of restraint b : WIDESPREAD

i still fail to see how a rate can be rearing, or widespread.... Piracy can certainly be described as rampant, but a rate can be large or small or many other adjectives, just not rampant.

Re:Oh, good grief.

[Random_Goblin]

pearls before swine.. pearls before swine.

Not KDE

[hug_the_penguin]

Ubuntu, not Kubuntu.

Why would they put KDE on a system and yet not use Kubuntu instead? It seems likely to me they're using gnome, which given their wonderful new Cairo API would be a good thing. I personally went right off KDE when i realised most of the apps were eating huge proportions of CPU and memory. It got so bad that i switched to a GNOME media player, despite me loving amarok. Now i don't use KDE. I'm thinking of this from the point of view that presumably macedonian poor families can't afford the latest and greatest computers and so everything you can squeeze out of it would surely be welcome.

Re:Not KDE

[jonasj]

You ask why they would put KDE on Ubuntu instead of using Kubuntu? Uh, Kubuntu *is* just Ubuntu with KDE put on it. You can do apt-get install kubuntu-desktop on a Ubuntu box.

Kubuntu is just the name of the Ubuntu install cd that installs KDE instead of Gnome by default.

So the parent post was right in saying that "that setup is always just a few mouse clicks away".

Re:Not KDE

[DimGeo]

Well, QT may be a part of KDE, but KDevelop works just fine under Ubuntu's default Gnome desktop :-P. Like I said, just a few mouse clicks away :)

Re:Not KDE

[hug_the_penguin]

Yes but I made the point that if even my 2.4Ghz box struggles with Qt based apps, then it's hardly likely poor macedonian families or even the project could afford to supply computers with the meat to run it. Besides, the article suggests they're using GNOME anyway... KDevelop is still my choice of Development Environment but I don't use it for Qt development because I prefer that programs don't hog 5% of my CPU each... Personally i'm addicted to the CLI and that's unlikely to change. But for GUI apps, there's nothing like GTK

Re:Not KDE

[DimGeo]

I see.

My Apologies

[Anonymous Coward]

I could not find any truly amusing anagrams for "Macedonia"

http://www.mbhs.edu/~bconnell/cgi-bin/anagram.cgi? cpw=1&phrase=macedonia

Re:My Apologies

[Anonymous Coward]

I could not find any truly amusing anagrams for "Macedonia"

Try the one not listed: CODEMANIA

Re:My Apologies

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to be a comedian, eh?

Re:My Apologies

[paulatz]

One of my best friend's girlfriend is from Macedonia. He will be realy disappointed when he finds out that she doesn't exist.

Re:My Apologies

[Anonymous Coward]

If your best friend posts on slashdot, I would be surprised if she *does* exist.

5% = Rampant Software Piracy???

[TheAxeMaster]

Somehow, that doesn't add up too well. If only 5% of the country's 2 million people (that's 100,000 to you and me) have internet, how is software piracy rampant? Wouldn't it only effect ... umm ... 5% of the population, MAX? Probably less than half of those are even capable enough to find places to download hacked software/keygens, so we're down to 50k people, 2.5%, max.
 
Or does that suggest that bootlegging, not illegal downloading, that is the piracy problem? Because, if people without internet are using pirated software, then they've bootlegged it from black markets/friends most likely. Maybe that's a good bit of information to refute the RIAA/MPAA's so called "facts" about internet piracy of their products, to help get them off bittorrent's back.
 
I'm not counting on that though....

Re:5% = Rampant Software Piracy???

[meringuoid]

Or does that suggest that bootlegging, not illegal downloading, that is the piracy problem? Because, if people without internet are using pirated software, then they've bootlegged it from black markets/friends most likely.

This is Eastern Europe. Piracy is huge there, and yes, it's largely of the burned-disc variety. This is a problem, because if FYR Macedonia wants to do business seriously with the West - and most importantly with the EU, which is immensely rich and right on its doorstep - then it needs to sort that kind of thing out. And a small, poor, unstable, only recently independent and very vulnerable country like FYR Macedonia has got to do business seriously with the EU, else it's going nowhere.

So. They need to clean up this whole rampant-piracy problem. But the economy's gone all to hell because of all the trouble there's been in the region lately. Can't afford to send huge sums off to Redmond. Solution: Ubuntu.

Re:5% = Rampant Software Piracy???

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Eastern Europe. Piracy is huge there, and yes, it's largely of the burned-disc variety.

If it's anything like Bulgaria was when I was there in 1995, that would be the *pressed* disc variety.

MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

parent is another (probably american) idiot

Very Funny Ha-Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be April Fool's Day, because I have never heard of a country named "Macedonia." Come on, Slashdot editors, check your facts!

Re:Very Funny Ha-Ha

[colinrichardday]

And maybe Alexander the Great should conquer you for your insolence.

The right direction

[Malangali]

This is exactly the sort of initiative that is needed in poorer countries. The reason so many people remain poor around the world is that they don't have skills that are of value in the global marketplace, and for the most part they don't have the opportunity to get those skills. When you get the kids wired, they get the opportunity to learn the same skills that people in wealthier countries make dang sure to give their own kids - and we're all the better off for it.

Operating System classes

[Freaky Spook]

It used to be the argument between rich & poor schools. "We have a gym, swimming pool, theater, you don't have anything!!!" Now its, "We run Windows, your poor, you run Linux!!!" Open Source is a really good idea though, it will give pepole many more opportunities to access & use computers.

Re:Operating System classes

[cdc179]

It used to be the argument between rich & poor schools. "We have a gym, swimming pool, theater, you don't have anything!!!" Now its, "We run Windows, your poor, you run Linux!!!"

More like, "We run GNU/Linux, where we know what the shit we are doing. You poor bastard, running windows, have no freedoms and are left with a piece of shit."

Re:Operating System classes

[TheDarkener]

Linux isn't considered the "poor man's operating system", is it? I've never once seen anyone running Linux in a trailer park!!

Re:Operating System classes

[Anonymous Coward]

I fix rich peoples computers, by my experience more rich people are more interested in linux (if they don't run it already, and more do) than less wealthy people I know. This is a small account with a tiny experimental population so it's not worth much scientifically, but my account would suggest the opposite. The reasons seem to be different, it's not about that's it's free or that's not supporting the windows monopoly. It tends to be about supporting a system that is less prone to viruses and problems once it's set up properly, the biggest factor against switching to linux I've heard (mostly from people who play video games, or who like the option to play video games) is setting up Cedega and/or it running slower than windows (which is a big issue to gamers).

Personally I've always recommmended Ubuntu.

Well, kubuntu then?

[Crouty]

Two points I's like to address: First, freedom is more important than free beer (or Metaxa or wha'ever). Not falling for Microsoft's lock-in offers is a step in the right direction.

Second, Gnome/KDE, it does not really make that much of a difference. ubuntu, kubuntu, both look nice, can run browsers, office software, software development software and definately a heck more than they would have if they were to use licensed payware.

UBUNTU LOGO FOR SLASHDOT??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it about time to have a dedicated logo for Ubuntu Linux here on Slashdot?!

Darko Arso?

[daliman]

Are they kidding?

Remove the 'o' characters - Dark Ars

Add an 'e' to clarify pronunciation - Dark Arse

I think someone is being taken for a ride...

Re:Darko Arso?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so sure about that. I have a Data Structures professor from Hungary whose name is... Lotzi Boloni.

Don't believe me? Here's his web page: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~lboloni/ (Look at the titlebar of your browser when you go there.)

Re:Darko Arso?

[AJDEfix]

The name in the title should appear as ArsoV (as is in the text)

Re:Darko Arso?

[daliman]

Yes, looks like there's a mistake somewhere; in the intro the name is Arso, further down it is Arsov.

"Arangel Angov met with Darko Arso, Technology Integration Manager at the Education Development Center..."

"...in touch with Darko Arsov and arranged a one-on-one interview..."

Arsov doesn't work nearly as well ;)

don't forget

[SamoVasGledamo]

Damn, just when I was going to say: You forgot Macedonia!

Why o WHY did they have to name it Ubuntu?

[ImaNihilist]

Great victory for Ubuntu, and Linux in general. I have to wonder if Ubuntu wouldn't be even more popular if it didn't have such a stupid name. Sometimes I think that's the only reason that RedHat ever took off...only Linux distro without a strange name.

Re:Why o WHY did they have to name it Ubuntu?

[Celsius 233]

Ubuntu is named after the South African ideology of humanity towards others.

Re:Why o WHY did they have to name it Ubuntu?

[Directrix1]

I think the stupid CD cover art is far worse than the name.

Re:Why o WHY did they have to name it Ubuntu?

[Mechcozmo]

Like Windows "Vista" or Windows "eXPerience" is any better? Puhleeeaze...

Re:Why o WHY did they have to name it Ubuntu?

[BetterThanCaesar]

"Red Hat" means "Rode Hatred" in Swedish. That's a strange name, almost offensive.

But oh, I'm sorry, it has to be in English to be accepted!

Please somebody

[Anonymous Coward]

post here a translation of the FS song in Macedonian

          Join us now and share the software;
          You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
          x2

          Hoarders may get piles of money,
          That is true, hackers, that is true.
          But they cannot help their neighbors;
          That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

          When we have enough free software
          At our call, hackers, at our call,
          We'll throw out those dirty licenses
          Ever more, hackers, ever more.

          Join us now and share the software;
          You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free.
          x2

In regards to Macedonia

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you mean the Yugoslavian republic of Skopje and not the real Macedonia which is Northern Greece?

That "Macedonia" (aka Skopje) is like renaming Tijuana to New York: The Big Apple.

Re:In regards to Macedonia

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no one in America cares. Seriously. Tijuana or New York have far larger economies than the nations of Skopje, Macedonia, or for that matter, Greece. And they're only cities! When any one of those Adriatic hellholes gets a GDP that can be measured in money and not in goats, let us know. Then we'll talk.

Re:In regards to Macedonia

[queef_latina]

BORK! BORK! BORK!

Imagine

[eventDriven]

Imagine if some wise tutor could harness this technology and knowledge and instill a pupil with the ability to conquer the world...

muwhahaha...

yes yes I know I know...it's not the same Macedonia.

FSM did a great job

[Karaman]

Free Software is a winner once more. Alas, not everywhere. I live in a neighboring country, Bulgaria, and it looks like our last government made a life-contract with MS for our schools and state administration. Corruption, you will ask, yes, a contractor which is in close relation to the government supplied all the MS products and there was no public auction for this contract. The MS products were even bought at higher than normal prices. And one more thing: There are computers in the state administration somewhere in smaller towns, that can only run DOS, but they still have bought MS WINXP for these PCs. And the contract being for life means as long as MS suppllies products our children will be forced to use Windows at school and call themselves computer-skilled. For me it is the worst nightmare. Go go go, Free Software Macedonia! I wish you more success!

Re:FSM did a great job

[Sri Ramkrishna]

It doesn't really matter. You can still install linux on these machines. It just takes some work. Especially if they aren't even capable of running windows whats the point?

The guy got his money, but the movement continues.

sri

Re:FSM did a great job

[MrP-(at work)]

That goes without saying. Without the Flying Spaghetti Monster, there would be no free software

blessed is his noodly appendage

Re:FSM did a great job

[JudeanPeople'sFront]

Hi, I worked for two years as a sysadmin in the Bulgarian legal system. Here are some thoughts on why the GP post matters:

1.We paid for this overpriced shugar-coated crap from our limited budget, while millions live on $200 per month and the government can't provide medical care for our children.

2.Sysadmins are often not allowed to install Linux/Unix. If they do it, it's in 5000 different ways - there are no official standards as in Munich or Massachusets.

3.Most people are not computer literate, including a lot of government employees. These people are now given new computers with Microsoft's software, and that's all they are going to learn, use, and expect the others to use. Market domination is so much easier while the market is still small.

That's why Gates is giving crippled Windows cheap in Asia. Once the users are hooked, he will make them pay the Microsoft tax every couple of years. I hope our Macedonian friends succeed, so we can pressure our own government to follow suit.

Re:FSM did a great job

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Well, a linux group could potentially help by saying "our community will support x linux distro because it has the best translation of our language and is stable" and you could spread standardization that way.

As for the contract. Until your people fixes your govt there is not much you can do other than to point out negligance through the free press or through some other means. But it's most likely this official got a lot of kickbacks for signing a contract to have Microsoft be an exclusive OS vendor. Of course, one could try to get IBM into the fray. :-)

sri

flights booked

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at the MS travel office in Redmond.
We read Slashdot all the time so we know in advance where the salespersons will want to go next.
We have chartered a plane for next week.
Expect a "Macedonian ministry of education revokes linux deployment plan" article here come January.

F.Y.R.O.M. and Macedonia

[Anonymous Coward]

Now most people here probably don't know anything about the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) as it's known to the world. The article calls it a small country in southern Europe - that's not really the whole truth. To understand why FYROM chose to use Linux, and has such low Internet stats etc, it is essential to know that they're direct consequences of the recent war(s) they've been involved in. Both the breakup of Yugoslavia and the recent "civil war"-like tension within Macedonia's own borders. If people knew that it was a small war ravaged country struggling even to become recognised by it's neighbours perhaps people wouldn't think this news very noteworthy - after all if it's all they can afford where's the real choice?

Re:Who's laughing now?

[wile_e_wonka]

Do you trust Wikipedia?

If not, how about the CIA's World Factbook?

In one last ditch effort, if Wikipedia and the CIA are too shady for you, how about the self declared First Macedonian WWW Page? (I might note that the bottom of this page mentions that it "was rated in the 'Top 5% of the Web'")

Only 5% are online?

[Milton Waddams]

How does the other 95% get their porn!?!?

Re:Only 5% are online?

[6*7]

I guess there are enough sheep for them.

Re:Only 5% are online?

[ChunderDownunder]

This is Macedonia we're talking about, not New Zealand.

Re:Only 5% are online?

[donscarletti]

Macedonia is close enough to Hungary so that they can go get most of the internet's porn in person after a short trip up the Danube.

Re:Only 5% are online?

[chris_eineke]

By swapping... floppies! :P

The Alexander Shall Rise Again

[Doc Ruby]

Aren't they also offering nationwide WiFi too? If Macedonia kicks America's tech butt while we devolve into some medieval theocracy, I'm going to burn a flag or something.

Re:The Alexander Shall Rise Again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to offer nationwide WiFi when nobody has a computer...

Re:The Alexander Shall Rise Again

[VortexMK]

No, the whole story is a lie. The ISP that got the money from USAID has commercialized the WIFI and have put a price of 2$ for every 100MB... the name of the ISP is OnNet and the owner of the company Peter Cemerikic (of bosnian descent), is very well known for his criminal activities. Sadly, corruption still blooms in Macedonia, and people like Cemerikic are allowed to to walk free and spread lies instead of being behind bars (and waking by his new found boyfriend Earl). So, no, Macedonia is far from free WiFi, and far from anything free as long as the politicians are corrupted and judistical system still sleeps.

Re:The Alexander Shall Rise Again

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not true. USAid provided money for connecting all public elementary and high schools with Internet. ONnet ISP won the deal with USAid. They used the money to build a commercial wireless network in Macedonia and have in plan to cover the major cities with wifi access but ON.net is following the deal with USAID and provides the schools with internet. I don't see any misuse of the USAid's money.

Re:The Alexander Shall Rise Again

[Doc Ruby]

The other reply to your comment (though AC) disputes your criticism. And the story I cited doesn't say it's free - it explicitly says WiFi costs $18:mo, though it omits transfer fees (and surely plenty of other finer details). And what's the relevance of Cermerikic's "Bosnian descent"? Where are you getting your info, and what's your stake in the postwar Balkans?

Re:The Alexander Shall Rise Again

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation -2
    50% Troll
    50% Flamebait

What, are you TrollMods Macedonian or something? Before your attack mods took effect, we actually got a couple of responses with very interesting info about the Macedonian WiFi, context for the Ubuntu story. So it really seem like you're medieval American theocrats, or more likely their zombie slaves. I'm going to burn you with a flag now.

Re:The Alexander Shall Rise Again

[VortexMK]

Well, the problem is that you don't live here to see what is OnNet doing. Things are not like they seem.

Piracy? WTF?

[Mr. Freeman]

Excuse me, but what does this have to do with software piracy?

There is a school district switching over to Linux computers, I just don't see where any type of piracy is involved here.

The school isn't using them for piracy, and they aren't using pirated software.

WOULD PEOPLE PLEASE STOP MENTIONING PIRACY IN EVERY DAMN ARTICLE THAT HAS THE WORD "INTERNET" IN IT!

FYROM, NOT MACEDONIA

[Anonymous Coward]

FYROM, please, not Macedonia! Obey National Treaties, please.

Elsewise, I might leave Sallonica tonight and konquer Skopjie by tommorow.

Re:FYROM, NOT MACEDONIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Go cure your self esteem elsewhere, leave ancient politics and fears you have from Macedonians in the past where they belong to, and learn to appreciate a good tech step forward or you lost your way into Slashdot god knows how.

dont hold your breath

[Vitriolix]

seeing as they are using the old 1.x gnome logo that hasnt been associated with the project in like 4 years i woudlnt count on an ubuntu logo til at least 2009

Re:Piracy? WTF?

[kkek]

I believe the reference to piracy was saying that more strict encorcement or copywrite laws intended to stop piracy is good for linux because it forces those who cant afford windows to linux.

I just don't see where any type of piracy is involved here.

That was their point. The combination of the fact that people will have used linux in school, and it doesnt require piracy to run will hopefully bring about more use of linux.

The rest buy women off the streets

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm not making a joke - they're a poor war ravaged country and they have a huge problem with human trafficking - essentially they're a transit and destination country for women sold into slavery and sexual exploitation.

Bölöni != Boloni

[Anonymous Coward]

Listen, I understand you're trying to be funny but the simple truth is that you Americans just have to learn that characters like ø, å, æ and ö are NOT simply accented variations of o,a and e. They actually represent other sounds that are nothing like the english sounds you're used to. The letter 'ö' is pronounced like the "ir" in "bird", So Bölöni would in fact be pronounced B-[ir]-l-[ir]-ni.

Re:Bölöni != Boloni

[Anonymous Coward]

My point was that names that look odd in English aren't. I know his name isn't pronounced that way, because I've had him for a teacher for the past semester! The parent poster was under the impression the foreign name wasn't real.

Re:Bölöni != Boloni

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I thought you would know. But did you actually tell the slashdotters that his name is NOT pronounced the way it looks? No, you didn't. I believe most people would think you were just pointing out funny names - not giving them any insights into how different other cultures can be :)

Re:Bölöni != Boloni

[daliman]

I was meaning it as a joke, yes :) There were no umlauts or accents or anything with Mr Darko Arso's name, so I can only assume that it is pronounced how it looks.

Re:Bölöni != Boloni

[donscarletti]

When writing English, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Greek people will transliterate their names from their native alphabets into the English superset of the Latin alphabet. This is because it is only expected that an English speaker will know the alphabet they use. So, when they are working in an English speaking country (like the United States), why shouldn't someone who's name was originally written in another Latin superset transliterate their name as much as possible into the English Latin superset so that native speakers of English can pronounce it. In English the symbol used above that ö is known as a diaeresis mark and is used to signify that two consecutive vowels do not constitute a diphthong and thus the vowel must make its default sound (usually the long sound) which is wholly in line with the "baloney" like pronounciation.

This is not a phenomenon localised to America, it is simply caused by people only being familiar with the character set they know. Until central Europeans in general learn the difference between "w" and "v" in English, they have no right to lecture English speakers for not being able to pronounce their own additions to Latin script. While we are discussing ignorance in pronunciation, I think you are probably not aware that most American accents are Rhotic, i.e. they would pronounce the two instances of the letter r that you added as if they were at the front of words. Thus, B-[ir]-l-[ir]-ni would only in fact be pronounced like the Hungarian Bölöni by an Englishman, a New Zealander or an Australian. Pronounced by an American this name would just sound plain awful (though insistently this applies to most words Americans pronounced) with lound rs and far too much time would be spent pronouncing the awkward rl and rn consonant transitions.

World First?

[dartarrow]

Makes me wonder if it's possible to create a country that has 100% of its computers running on OSS. And methinks Ubuntu is a good choice here. Check out http://www.edubuntu.org/, Mark Shuttleworth seems genuinely interested in developing OSS for the not-so-developed countries. Its not just about the technology or the beauty or KDE vs Gnome, I think the philosophy of ubuntu fits in well with the market needs and the objectives here.

Indeed

[Poromenos1]

Yes, whenever I see that I keep wondering why they talk about only one section of Greece before realizing they're not :/ (for those who don't know, Greece is divided into geographical sections, the northernmost of which is called Macedonia, it is the southern part of the ancient Macedonia)

Re: Developers, Developers, Developers...

[er_head66]

I thought the best thing that ever happened to Free Software were Developers? Oh right, that was Windows...

Correction..

[Gonik]

The country's name is Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia according to the UN. Not Macedonia..

Re:Correction..

[ufo84]

No it's not, the official name is Macedonia, The Republic of, or in short just Macedonia. You want to tell me what my name is or what?

Re:Correction..

[Frogbert]

And Americas name is the United States of America but you don't go around calling it that because it wastes time.

Re:Correction..

[hunterx11]

They still have nothing on the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya! Which of course is used far more often than that pedestrian form, "Libya."

Re:Correction..

[powers_722]

Us Canadians live in America too. North America contains much more than just the USA, but somehow they are the ones we go around calling americans (I refuse).

Re:Correction..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha Ha Ha so your name is Macedonia???

You are hilarious and may be missing something....

Re:Correction..

[Russellkhan]

So what do you call them? (I'm honestly curious)

Re:Correction..

[egnatius]

French speakers use "Étasunien" or "États-unien" and Spanish speakers use "Estadounidense". Both translate roughly as "United Statesian". Notice the absence of anything resembling the word "America".

Since many people outside the USA define America as the proper name for an entire CONTINENT, not just one country,they're quite unwilling to use the term "American".

Several alternative demonyms have been proposed.

Err

[Anonymous Coward]

Call us back when you can get on a plane without getting an anal probe. -- Hellhole

I wonder...

[kukickface]

was this Alexander's own idea? Or did Aristotle tell him to do it?

Macedonia

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one Macedonia and that's a northern geographical section of Greece.

Err, no.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in the Macedonia the article talks about, anyway (FYROM). But, since we're going on stereotypes here, I wouldn't expect a dumb american to know any better. Please mod me offtopic.

Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[SamoVasGledamo]

Follow the link to the macedonian FOSS site and look closely at the yellow box in the upper left corner, then click on it and read.

F.Y.R.O.M. is the name that the European Commission kindly asks us all to use, because of a spat with Greece over what the term "Macedonia" actually refers to. The Greeks claim that Macedonia is in fact a region spanning parts of Greece, "the F.Y.R.O.M" and Bulgaria, IIRC. The Macedonian people refer to their country as "Macedonia", just as Americans refer to the country they live in as "America", despite the fact that the term encompasses vast areas clearly beyond the borders of the U.S.A.

It is of course, no factual error to call the country F.Y.R.O.M. But you probably don't go around saying that Lhasa is in China, do you?

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[ufo84]

Acctually it is an error to call the country FYROM because it's constitutional name is Republic of Macedonia. You do know what a constitution is and what it means to a country? It's written there, you can check if you like. The European Commission isn't asking anyone to use that name. USA, China, Russia, Poland and many more have already recognized the country as Republic of Macedonia and many more countries are doing it every year. Just a matter of time untill greek nationalists loose this one.

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not really a matter of greek nationalism. What we are trying to avoid is nationalism. I have no objection to an official name including the term Macedonia. But the name "Republic of Macedonia" is misleading and could lead to FYROM demanding greek grounds in the future (a part of the geographical area Macedonia is now in Greece and another one in Bulgary). Take into consideration the fact the imperialism always needs rivalries between nations and takes advantage of situations like this one...

Anyway, congratulations to the Free Software Macedonia group! I would have no objection to them promoting free software in our part of Macedonia too ;-).

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[Anonymous Coward]

greek "nationalists" loosing a name they own since 3000 years ago??? You are from another planet my friend. And by "nationalist" you mean Alexander the Great I guess!

Oh and by the way, please call yourself Athenian and Corinthian and Spartan and whatever makes you happy! There are so many nice Greek names to pick from, next time it might work

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[Anonymous Coward]

This is indeed one of the problems with the name but there is also something more important.

When FYR Macedonia formally became an independent nation, they blatantly attempted to *steal* Greek history. Their first flag consisted of the Star of Vergina on a red background. For those of you that don't know, the Star was the royal symbol of the Ancient Macedonians. They claimed to be the descendants of Alexander the Great and their government silently approved of this revision of histroy.

Also, even if they were not intending to make false claims, the fact that the country is named Macedonia makes normal people, without knowledge of history and the population shifts of the region throughout the eons, link the Ancient Macedonians to the country currenlty named "Macedonia". How many of you know that the FYROMians are really Slavs, without any historical link to the Ancient Greek Macedonians? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slav_Macedonians

In my opinion, they should have named their country something along the lines of Slavic Macedonia, or at least North Macedonia, i.e. a name that would indicate that their relation to Macedonia is only geographical, not historical.

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[Kalashnikov_BXL]

As far as I'm concerned you may call yourselves New-Yorkers or whatever other name you like. But choosing a name and stealing the historical legacy of a country is another thing. As far as you accept -as all aknowledged historians- that ancient macedonia was a greek kingdom and stop using greek historical symbols (such as your old hilarious flag), you call call yourselves whatever you want :-)

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[Secrity]

The problem seems to be that Greece has trademark disputes with the name "Macedonia" and the symbol on Macedonia's flag. There does not seem to be any evidence that the Republic of Macedonia has a territorial dispute with Greece. Greece needs to join the rest of the civilised world and get over the name of the Republic of Macedonia.

Somebody in another post mentioned something about Quebec changing it's name to New York and annexing the State of New York. I seriously doubt that any Americans would give a rat's ass if Quebec changed it's name to New York (although some Americans might giggle). I think that the Quebecois would take serious issue with the name of their province changing to an English name.

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[Lith Maethor]

not only did FYROM tried to steal greek history in the beginning, but they blatantly did the same with bulgarian history (claiming famous bulgarians as their own, etc) ...some, go even further (and from what i am told by "Macedonians" it seems to be what they learn at school and/or from official sources) and speak of a "Macedonian" minority in Greece ...not even having the knowledge to separate such a minority from Vlachs, who happen to be a linguistic minority (and being one, i never saw any attempt from the government to supress our cultural identity or whatnot, in fact, i have seen the opposite)

...now, i understand the need for a country to have a sense of history and identity, but i highly doubt the way to do so is by stealing either from your neighbours with no remorse ...having FYROM use the name Macedonia is like having Egypt use the name Africa, India using Asia, Argentina using America and so on and so forth... doesn't make much sense, does it? ...yes, their country is part of Macedonia, geographically speaking... but this is where all connections end ...Ancient Macedonians were accepted into the Olympic Games and for anyone with basic knowledge of history (or better) this means only one thing... Ancient Macedonians were Greeks ...simple as that

...but, even an optimist like myself have to admit... such things will continue to happen as long as people don't give a frell about their own history ...or as someone said... ignorance is not bliss, its frellin' annoying

Re:Don't you F.Y.R.O.M. me

[orionbelt]

Re: FYROM's territorial disputes:

THE VISION OF "GREATER MACEDONIA"

If you have no time to read all of it, you may at least click on the Figure links, and read the captions.

Granted, this is not territorial disputes through official channels (yet), but the raw material is there for this to occur, if it does not stop now.

More of the Macedonia Project in the News

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some other good links

An Interview with Peter Cemerikic, CEO of Macedonian ISP On.Net

Arangel Angov of Free Software Macedonia talks about Linux

Lessons from Macedonia's national school wi-fi network

Red Hat is strange

[quanticle]

As a name, I don't think Ubuntu is any stranger than Red Hat, or Windows for that matter. I do take issue with their release titles (e.g. warty warthog, hoary hedgehog, etc.) but thats another story.

Ahora

[Anonymous Coward]

vendrá Alejandro Magno y les comerá el bollo a varios...

Re:Who's laughing now?

[nagora]

Do you trust Wikipedia?

Er, no. Does anyone?

If not, how about the CIA's World Factbook?

Which does say: "Macedonia; note - the provisional designation used by the UN, EU, and NATO is Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)".

Any group of people can draw a shape on a map and call it anything they like, but what the rest of the world calls it is important too.

TWW

Re:Who's laughing now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you miss the point. CIA world factbook or wikipedia are not formal bodies for sanctioning names. There are other international bodies that rule those aspects, like agreeing on the name by which a country is addressed to in international treeties, agreements etc

And yes... I am a Greek, and no... we don't want to conquer FYROM... and yes, I think that people just focus on the name issue and fail to see what is going on here... and no, there is much more than the name at stake here... and I could keep on going about politics.

But I believe that it is the wrong thread to mix politics with OSS. I am happy for our neighbors who try to make such a bold move. The Balkans as a whole need such initiatives and we need to get off some over-the-sea-imposed monopolies, a situation not getting better by the CONSTANT intervention of some over-the-sea-supposed-to-be allies.

DID I GET POLITIC AGAIN? sorry :)

Re: Office Apps---Tech+Culture Gap?

[RealisticCanadian]

And so, flamewar aside; I have to agree with your point here.

North America is currently caught in a cycle. "You don't need to know that" and "I can't understand why people would do that" are two common themes I hear in many day-to-day social conversations.... our kids don't take advantage of the learning resources they have because they are constantly taught that 'in the real world, you are rewarded not for what you do, but how good you look doing it.'

Which all also ties into the article we had last week,
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/2 8/2343249&tid=99

I find that everyone my wife and I have met from abroad and when abroad--Europe, Asia, Africa, even Australia in a different way--they seem to see the value in getting an appropriate education; understand the (introvert/thinking man)'s joy in activities like improving efficiency, building something for the sole purpose of destroying it; playing video games, actually hunting or harvesting the food you plan to eat, using UBUNTU Not just because you refuse to get BSOD'd again, but because you Like being able to actually improve the software you use.

I also see them rewarding intelligence and capability far more often than having a particular character.

All of these are also qualities I see in those who have been through times when they've really had to fight to survive, and those who have reached a certain level of success.... (which is relative to each of those I have had the pleasure of interacting with.)

This s something I strongly believe we will have to rectify; I believe I see the beginnings of change in a renewed work ethic in people among my age group, say 5 years back to 10 years ahead of me (19-34) which I can only hope bodes well for the turns society is going to take in the next 20 years.

I can only hope it means we won't be too technologically behind by tthe time I have school-aged children.

Re:Office Apps (warning: rant, rave, and scream)

[d.valued]

Something to keep in mind about the Balkans:

They are - and have been - and probably will be - a political and religious powderkeg.

Greeks in particular have a few things to be pissed about. The religious leader of their faith is in a different country because of how the lines were redrawn post-WWI. Hundreds of thousands were massacred in Asia Minor during the '20s by the Turks, but no one there will admit to it. (And yes, I know, they didn't get the worst of it. It was still brutal.)

In 1452, they (and the rest of the Orthodox world) lost their highest cathedral to the Ottomans, who desecrated parts of Hagia Sophia and turned it into a mosque. (Think of it as though St Peter's were conquered by Iran.) Now it's used solely as a tourist site.

The name of Macedonia was assigned to the former southern province of communist Yugoslavia in 1952 by Tito.

There's no historic basis for the name; the region of Macedonia whence Philip and Alexander came from was much further south.

Yes, at the time, there was no concept of Hellenic unity; that developed mainly after the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, which put the final nail in the coffin of unity between Rome and Constantinople. However, there was this understanding that they spoke the same tongue, they learned the same thought (pop quiz: who taught Alexander?), they spread the same ideas and believed in the same faith as everyone else on the peninsula now known as Greece.

The Balkans as a whole are rife with religious and ethnic hates going back centuries. The Catholics hate the Orthodox, and both hate the Muslims. The Croatians and Albanians and Serbians are at each others' throats, the Greeks hate the Albanians for taking part of their country, the Turks for the same reason as well as the historical stuff, and everybody hate the Roma (gypsies).

The only thing that kept a lid on Yugoslavia's ethnic groups, well, was the iron fist of Tito.

Twice for me.. both my fault

[xant]

Both times I've had to engage the command line it was because a network card wasn't working properly. In one case the builtin laptop wireless card wasn't turned on in the BIOS (don't ask). In the second case the desktop's ethernet card wasn't seated in the slot all the way. (Just enough, infuriatingly, to get power to make the activity light blink. Not enough to talk to the kernel.)

No operating system in the world could have dealt sensibly with either of those problems, so, for me, Ubuntu is batting 100% on hardware success in about 9 installations.

Re:Office Apps (warning: rant, rave, and scream)

[CRCulver]

There's no historic basis for the name; the region of Macedonia whence Philip and Alexander came from was much further south.

Not so. Any reputable archaeologist will tell you that ancient Macedonia is no divided between the Republic of Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria.

Ancient Macedonia

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the title of this article as "Ancient Macedonia...", and I immediately found myself revering the topic. Then, as it dawned on me that this was an article about modern macedonia, I realized I was filled with disdain and regret.

This about summarizes what has become of many of once great nations.

It also shows I think before I finish reading a sentence.

Poor Macedonia people...

[Anonymous Coward]

...now USA will have to bomb their coutry and kill thousands of children. Maybe US generals and CIA agents are already "discovering" that Macedonia tryed to buy uranium and H5N1 virus during the last years..

Math

[KlaymenDK]

2.000.000 population, 5% internet penetration, 5.000 Ubuntu desktops -- instant 5% market share if you look at it one way.

No wonder this makes headlines.

Re:Math

[jpop32]

2.000.000 population, 5% internet penetration, 5.000 Ubuntu desktops -- instant 5% market share if you look at it one way.

Which way of looking would that be? Seriously, I just don't see it.

Re:Office Apps (warning: rant, rave, and scream)

[kiril]

The name of Macedonia was assigned to the former southern province of communist Yugoslavia in 1952 by Tito.

My grandfather was born in 1924 and he was born in occupied Macedonian (in that time occupied by Serbia). Can you tell him in his face that he and his grandfather's are not Macedonians and somebody called Tito gave them that name.

In fact, someone should SUE microsoft or...

[tod_miller]

Argue that they will loose all rights to their patents because they are not protecting them if they do release a corporate version.

Microsoft only became popular because of piracy.

I say, Microsoft, don't be soft, force ALL users to pay. I have a DVD with cracked XP's, I run a LEGIT 2000 install on a partition at home.

It will be the last Microsoft I use. For the next 2 years I am sure games will run on win2k.

After that, I am sure they will run on my OSS OS of choice.

Slightly off-topic but needs to be pointed out

[markpapadakis]

What those thieves of history and names are trying to do, would be equivalent to them calling themselves 'Los Angeles' or any other U.S state. Its actually worse than that. The whole attempt to steal the name/history/culture from a country is pathetic and unthinkable.

And the best thing about this is that...

[Anonymous Coward]

...once Greeks discover this Slashdot article, they will start boycotting Ubuntu over the FYROM name dispute. I hope we'll suceed to totally eliminate it from Greece and replace it with what people should have stayed with from the beggining : Pure debian :>

"Macedonia"...what a disgrace for the human race!

[Anonymous Coward]

In one of the biggest frauds planetwise, the culture and heritage of one of the Hellenic tribes is attributed to people of Slavian origin...yes, this post is a troll, flamebait, and whatever else you would like to accuse me, and I don't give a fsck about how it is modded, but the truth shall be heard:

"MACEDONIA" IS HELLENIC HERITAGE.

Skopjia as a country have any right to exist...but you can't just steal the identity of other people.

My university degree says graduaded from University of Macedonia. It's a greek University, in Thesalloniki.

You Americans have been brainwashed to the death, you are naive to the bone, and you are willing to sacrifise morals in order to support your own little interests. The President that fooled you there are WMDs in Iraq, the government that consistently lies to you about the environment is the same group of people that decided to steal an identity from one country and to assign it to another.

There are large deposits of a rare metal alloy 10 times stronger than depleted Uranium in Skopjia.That's the real reason behind supporting "Macedonia". And the rest of the countries follow USA blindly, due to fear.

USA behaves exactly the same as the ancient Athenians did. But Athens was destroyed in the 30-year all-out war in the Greek region that destroyed the Greeks. Read your history (i.e. our history, because you don't have one), and stop doing the same mistakes.

You don't have to wonder "why do they hate us". It's right there, in front of you.

New GNOME Logo

[murrayc]

Please please please please use the GNOME Logo from this century on Slashdot:
http://live.gnome.org/LogoGuidelines

Were Macedonians so bad?

[asdomar]

I mean, they're poor, isolated being a small country, but why Ubuntu?

Re:Who's laughing now?

[GoombaJones]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_(Greece) Alot of political games are played in the Balkans...

Anyway, the Macedonian thema consists of alot of propaganda. Just as the people of F.Y.R.O.M. want to be recognized as the true Macedonians, there is a big number of people in Greece, that live in Macedonia(Greece) and also claim they are Macedonians (but beleive that Macedonians where always Greeks and they are _NOT_ a Macedonian-F.Y.R.O.M.ian minority as the US state department falsely stated in one of their reports). I'm sure in Bulgaria the same goes. So, naming F.Y.R.O.M. Macedonia could end up being a BIG DEAL. As it _IS_ unfair to dictate to the F.Y.R.O.M.ians what they are, it _IS ALSO_ unfair to dictate to people in Greece or Bulgaria that they are not Macedonian when their beleif of what Macedonian means is completely different. So things are not as simple as "Greece won't recognize F.Y.R.O.M. as Republic of Macedonia". I would like to discuss replies to this. :)

Poor kids

[kirk26]

having to use such a sucky OS and will not know the benefits of using Windows thus having an unsuccesful career in the IT industry. Oh well...

It's FYROM please

[Anonymous Coward]

No such country as Macedonia. The name wouldn't be so important but we are talking about shameless roberry of historical facts to attract tourism and some attention to this place.

America's department of state is using the term Macedonia because
1) they get allies in the EU
2) it's "divide and conquer"

But this is historical absurdity and the Intellectual Property of Aristotle, Alexander, etc. Those muthaz at FYROM don't even speak the language! Call the RIAA!

Re:Office Apps (warning: rant, rave, and scream)

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude! Cool it off! Your grandpa is a grown man, he will understand.

We called them "undeveloped"

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the days of former Yugoslavia, we have considered Macedonia as one of underdeveloped republics.

Since schools in Croatia still use Microsoft technologies, despite the fact that we're drowning in national debt, we could say that they're still underdeveloped, compared to my "rich" country.
Maybe the right word would be "smarter".

I've spoken to some croatian teachers, but they told me they use Microsoft because they need to prepare pupils for IT olympics on MS technology. Now, since Linux is going to be used exclusively, I wonder what would happen to our kids and their future medals.

I was thinking about persuading ministry of education to shift from LOGO and BASIC (at least) to Python as this is live language, not a relic from the past, unusable for making real applications - but some people told me that would be futile. So I gave up.

Open Source Good, Ignorance and Falsification Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I would refrain from posting here, since these news (should) have nothing to do with politics or history. Showing young people that another world exists, free of commercial gains, is great. However, I've read some comments that are provocative and the falsification of history for political gains shouldn't continue. Some of you don't give a damn about "a f* name" and don't understand about the whole "fuss". It's natural, people don't care unless something strikes them directly (remember 9/11?). Here it is then, for the rest of you.

Note: proving the hellenic identity of Macedonia, is like stealing an open church. Easy as 1, 2, 3. There are written documents in greek, since the 5th century BC (before Alexander), in Alexander's birthplace (Pella) - http://abnet.agrino.org/fotos/D009b.jpg. Aristotle, Alexander's teacher, spoke and wrote in greek; so did his pupil (to have a measure, "macedonian" at the time were like American English with "southern" accent and the occasional regional slang term). There are the findings in Vergina (royal graves of Macedonian kings). Today's "Macedonians", with a language awefully same to Bulgarian, didn't have a written alphabet until greek monks invented it, 1.500 years later (10th c.)!

For more:

http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/

[trolls who'll blink before a .gr, maybe you would care for a visit to the British Library; I'm saving you some time]

Here is the true name of this state, before WWII, when Tito decided to play a mind-game to the different nationalities of the region, to stop conflicts:

Vardarska Banovina

Here's the 1929 map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vardarska_Banovina

===

In this small part of the world, less than a quarter of the geographical region of Ancient Macedonia, today co-exist Albanians (25%), Turks (4%), Roma (3%), Serbs (3%), Bulgarians, Greeks, other smaller minorities (total 3%) and people of Slavic and Bulgarian origin, who identify (or are instructed to, since pre-school) theirselves as "Macedonians"; in other words, "Macedonians" are less than the two thirds of the entire population (2.0 m)

Before I continue, you'll have to understand about the differences between the terms "country", "state" and "nation". "Country" is a geographical term, "state" is a legal term and "nation" is a cultural term.

Even if you moved fairly recently into this planet, you'd notice the conflicts in the Balkans area. States that flirted with the USSR and communism ceased to exist (with a little help from your NATO friends). It was a long term goal for the US external policy makers, since the days of the Cold War. The enemy: Russians. The vision: to preserve the" American way of life" (note: don't let this thread to evolve into an anti-American flame, these are just information from official resources available publicly from your favourite Ministry -and understood from every non-amoeboid creature).

The prime target was Yugoslavia (it means "country of the Southern Slavs" -although it's used to describe a sum of subnationalities, "Southern Slavs" never shared a *common* national identity; eastern Slavs are Russians, Northwest Center Slavs are Czechs, Slovaks, Polish etc).

For reasons not explained further here, NATO (=Western states who had financial interests in the region and US with interests to "break" the orthodox/communist/russophile/insert-another--psyc hosis-here "arrow") set up the scenery (not that the former Yugoslavia leaders were angels, but you always need an excuse e.g. "weapons of mass destruction" for Iraq) and all hell broke loose.

Today, a "liberated" area, comprised of a multitude of states, each with a "macedoine" (how do you think the term evolved?) salad of nationalities, needs to be "stabilised".

The state with the strongest national identity, is Serbia (

Macedonia

[Hyperx_Man]

I lived in Macedonia for over 1 year, and open source is gaining ground. When I was consulting for ministry of finance, one of the objectives in creating new applications was to make sure they are not too tied in to Microsoft technologies. For example, they had this app that was dependant on Microsoft exchange server. We re-wrote it so any SMTP server could process the emails and convert them into SQL queries.

Note the article is not true.

[bob2cam]

Tried posting this before...

Apparently, nobody bothered to fact check the article or follow up on recent events.

I won't bother you with all the details, but what happened was a group effort of the Macedonian government, the Peoples Republic of China, USAID and Microsoft. Open source software was installed on SOME machines initially as a stop gap measure until the donations, money and resources could come together to rebuild the infrastructure. The end result is that Windows XP, and Microsoft Office were installed in all schools and on 6,000 computers donated by the PRC.

You can read more on the USAID site

Re:Note the article is not true.

[Doc Ruby]

You're the second person to post a note impugning the USAID/Macedonia projects, plausibly. Do you have a specific reference? Especially as a US agency is backing the program, I want to know more about how it's being (allegedly) abused.

Re:Note the article is not true.

[bob2cam]

Hi,
Yes, here is the link...
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/europe_eurasia/pres s/success/student_gateway.html

Re:Office Apps (warning: rant, rave, and scream)

[atomic777]

Why... why must we give others reason to perpetuate the balkan stereotype?

I am of "balkan" background and I saw this post, discussing an interesting initiative that we should all be praising. It's great to see positive news coming from that part of the world, even if this is just a drop in the bucket. It's the vision that's important. Why can't we just keep the discussion to that? I thought, almost 15 years after the breakup of Yugoslavia, that perhaps, just maybe, I might read through this entire thread without seeing a regression into political bickering, mention of Tito, or the Turks, war or ethnic cleansing, etc. etc. But, alas, I was wrong.

Does an article about some Linux initiative in Germany need to involve at some point a discussion of WW2? Why can't we just leave the past in the past and look forwards?

Re:Office Apps (warning: rant, rave, and scream)

[mikefe]

Does an article about some Linux initiative in Germany need to involve at some point a discussion of WW2? Why can't we just leave the past in the past and look forwards?

Right, just like those niggers we freed 50 years ago. Why can't they just look forward and not at the past?

So this is TrollMod

[iced_773]

You know what? I actually agree with you about the medieval theocracy thing. These Christianity-abusing extremists are causing the slow collapse of society. School systems requiring intelligent design? The far right trying to win votes in elections by accusing the other side of being "godless lib-er-als" and succeeding? This is abuse, and I am conservative and Christian! If they want to find someone who really is evil, they ought to examine Bush's number 2 and the events leading up to the Iraq War. But they're too afraid of finding planks in their eyes.

This has also shown up outside of politics. Anyone who has been keeping up with The Amazing Race: Family Edition knows how the Florida team will loudly proclaim their religious faith but act absolutely rotten to everyone else. It's these sorts of people who fuel my loathing for hypocrisy. And the "energy is liberated through blasphemy" troll isn't making anything any better.

What's worse, society is allowing these things. Remember the Dixie Chicks saying that Bush makes them ashamed of being from Texas? Do we hear them on the radio anymore? How about Janet Jackson and the Superbowl? We want to shoot CBS for that but commercials can push erectile dysfunction and natural male enhancement drugs at all hours? "Will someone please think of the children" indeed!

Examine the fall of the Roman Empire and compare it to modern American society. It sure frightens me.

You by no means deserve this troll moderation, and this is coming from someone who has you marked as "foe". Just thanks for giving me the opportunity to vent this frustration that has been building up for a while.

Re:So this is TrollMod

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks for the candor.

BTW, you might be interested in how Christianity's "merger" with the Roman Empire changed the religion. In my view, from a DIY faith, a reformation of Judaism, into a dogma that damaged both the theology and the empire. But I'm not much on faith myself, certainly not any that's taught, or empires for that matter.

Explained

[KlaymenDK]

Okay, it's like this: The population is 2M. 5% of those have intertet access from home. That would be 2M * 0.05 = 100k machines. Deploying 5.000 new Ubuntu machines *compares* to 5% of the internet-connected home computers.

I say "if you look at it one way" and "comparable" because we're not looking at the same pool of machines. But being school machines they are very likely to have an influence where it counts - in potential new computer users (as opposed to zombified corporate Windows users :-).

Re:Open Source Good, Ignorance and Falsification B

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with the moderators here? I'm surprised to see a lot of useless comments, with no factual information, with a score of 1 or higher (that means appearing on the main discussion for Joe-average-who-doesn't-change-the-view-ever), and you don't think that the above comment, with factual information, deserves at least a score of 1?!?!?