Well, the “problem” is, that our Education team is currently more a team of technical specialists and many work is done behind the scenes without communication to “the outside”. So even if you did not hear from us for some weeks, we are still alive and coding!

Here are just a few examples, that are going on behind the scenes:

• Translation of the new openSUSE Education Portal is work in progress. Many thanks to our contributors Guillaume for the Français, Freek de Kruijf for the Nederlands, Sabarth for the Português, Gankov for the Русский (Russian) Portal translation!
• Kirill is currently reviewing all 425(!) packages in the Build Service Education project and submitting them to openSUSE Factory afterwards – so openSUSE 12.1 will come with a huge set of packages directly inside the official repository.
• Cyberorg is working on the next release of the openSUSE Edu Li-f-e DVD with the LTSP integration.
• Anubusg1 and many others (the project currently lists 44 maintainers) are doing the “normal” packaging stuff like upgrading and fixing packages for 12.1 (aka Factory)

The Desktop4Education project from Austria was again present at the Conference and gave a great overview of the current status of the project during their talk. Good to hear that the project is being frequently used as a reference case by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture and as such promoted by them throughout Austria.

Talking with Andre Massing from the Simula Research Laboratory during his talk at the conference was quite interesting. Looks like the Science project might see some very interesting new packages in the next months. During the discussion, we agree that the Education and the Science project can share a lot of efforts in their project setups and organization. But they will stay separated (at least in the Build Service) as their audience is very different, even if they share some packages (which is currently done via links inside the Build Service).

If you do not know Stardict, you can get it from Yast. This is the official site.

A few dictionaries are also linked – ready and free to use – at Stardict website. However, I used Babylon when I was a Windows user and i have to admit that their dictionaries remain unbeaten. Matters not what language you want, mono-language or bi-language, technical, general purpose etc etc… they just rock!

You can get tons of dictionaries for free from Babylon website:

Now, go to Yast Software Manager and search for dictconv. Alternatively, you can install from source (which is what I personally did).

Installing is very easy: ./configure and then make all install

Now you’re all set. To use it to convert:

cd to the directory where you have the .BGL dictionaries and type: dictconv INPUT_FILENAME.BGL -o OUTPUT_FILENAME.ifo

Pay attention to the extension: must be .ifo. This will generate 3 files for each BGL dictionary: .ifo, .idx, .dict

Place all these 3 files in /usr/share/stardict/dic/ creating a separate folder for each dictionary. Then rebook Stardict and go to Manage Dictionary (bottom right): there you can select what comes first, activate or deactivate etc etc

Nothing difficult but def worth, and not only for non native speakers.. there are lots of technical terminology Babylon dictionaries that may well come handy.

Notice that with Stardict you can also implement Pronunciations of the typed words: see Stardict site: “WyabdcRealPeopleTTS package make StarDict pronounce English words. It is just many .wav files. Extract(tar -xjvf) the tarball at /usr/share/”.

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Sooo well… Have fun ~ Buon divertimento ~ Viel Spaß ~ I que te diviertas ~ Maak plezier ~ ha så roligt [hmm i’m just hoping the dictionaries mentioned just above are not making me do some poor figure for these few transations of “Have Fun”.. cuz i have no idea for any language except Italian :D]