 So, okay. So welcome everybody to this Bhutan Journey to Free Software. I have to apologize first, in the name of Pema Gele, who was supposed to attend the conference but could not because of visa problems, so I had to provide something in his name and on his behalf with the help of France Pop. Why both of us? Because both of us went once to Bhutan, so on some occasions I talked more about it, and helped them and helped to launch their national distribution. Okay, so Bhutan, what's Bhutan? Maybe some of us know about the country, maybe not. So Bhutan is a more right country, just more, in India, between India and China, mostly in the Himalaya Range. Bhutan is a country of mountains, forests, valleys, and that's all. Very high isolated country, depending on India, mostly for nearly everything and depending on India for its income, mostly the only income for Bhutan, economically speaking, is selling electricity to India. This country is a constitutional monarchy, which is on, actually I will define on its way to democracy, but in some way because the king of Bhutan is someone very clever about democracy, he wants his country to go very quickly to democracy, but the people don't want. That's kind of strange for us. They like, they have a big respect for the king, for the kingdom, and actually they don't see the need for democracy, that's pretty strange. But the king wants to enforce that, and he just resigned on December 2006 in favour of his son, and to try and enforce more democracy. There will be free elections next year, and they go slowly and quietly and peacefully towards democracy. Bhutan is one of the world's smallest economies, but probably one of the fastest growing. It's amazing to see development of information technology, especially in the capital city, Pimpu, which is the smallest capital city in the world, 30,000 people and no single red light traffic light. This is the only capital in the world without traffic light. The king of Bhutan has an interesting definition of development, and it became quite famous all over the world. Instead of defining the progress of the country in terms of national growth revenue, he defined this in terms of national growth happiness, and it became very famous because of this philosophy, quite Buddhist philosophy. It's currently ranked in the top 100 people with what the most influenced the world in the last years, just over George Bush. The language in Bhutan is named Zonga. I hope I pronounced it well. This is a Sino-Tibetan family language, and you have here an example of the script, and I can't read it. Actually, I just grabbed a sample somewhere. I have no idea what it does mean, so I hope the friends watching over there will be able to tell us what it's supposed to mean. So Bhutan, okay, you know everything about Bhutan now. So why did Bhutan decide to go with Frisabh to Earth? The main concern was that there was no support for their national language by commercial vendors. Bhutan is very proud, very keen to preserve its culture and its language. The use of Zonga is enforced everywhere in the country by the king, while many people, at least the most literate people, speak a very good English. Actually, I felt ashamed speaking English with them because I suck at it, but they still have to use Zonga everywhere. It's kind of enforced by the law. So they have to support it in computing. They made some initial attempts with commercial vendors, and of course the most famous one, with some disappointment. The recent version from Microsoft Vista is called to support Zonga. However, they made kind of a small mistake. They just called it Tibetan Bhutan, and people in Bhutan really don't like to be connected to Tibetan people. They are very close connection, of course, but they don't think like Tibetan. This is a different culture, and moreover, a different language. They don't understand each other, so Zonga is not Tibetan. So they're probably concerned for Bhutan, so they decided to go their way with free software after wasting some money to get some support for Zonga in Microsoft Windows products. The major motivation here is to be able to... The major motivation is to be able to modify sources to adapt for their language, for sources of software. So they decided to go with free software, with Linux, and more than they decided to choose Debian. That's an interesting thing to hear about. The first motivation that Demagele gave to me when we talked about that is the robustness and our good established practice of policy. I think the first one I mentioned when talking about Debian was the policy. So apparently the policy is kind of a good thing to have. We have a big flexibility in our packaging process, which seems to be also interesting for them. They're not really concerned with something we hear often about about Debian release, not too often, have old software, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. Having firefox one or whatever, or an available one or whatever, it's not really a concern for them. It's okay. All these applications are not really a concern. And it's easy to work on localization in Debian. At least this is their feeling. I'm not sure they're right. So how does this Zonka Linux build? Well, at first it was a project to first begin with, to prepare the ground to build for distribution. The point was first to incorporate support for Zonka in Linux and mostly in application, of course. And user's application at the point is to have a completely localized desktop system. So they work on technical issues related to rendering and input methods, which is a very common problem, is all South Asia language support. There are all complex languages with many, many rendering and input issues. Could they have a complex language for me at all? Do you want me to define the concept of complex language? What kind of complex language? I'm not the best specialist for that, but a complex language could be defined very easily. It was something that combines in whatever method. In Indic languages, so I have to be very careful about what I'm saying because I'm listening by some people in the Indic community here. And you combine words with consonants and this makes another grip. So you input one consonant, one word, and then it changes the glyphs. So that's basically the definition of complex language. You find these complex languages all over South and South East Asia. They need to recruit translators. So actually they work with college, particularly a college in Timpu, the capital city, which is named Sheru City College, to recruit translators. They also need to define a common terminology for everything computer related, which is a very common problem in language who don't have any computer terminology. So this is the good way. You don't define a terminology then to work on translation and not start to make it easier to translate. And then localize and use your application. So modular, open-office.org, and so forth. In 2006, they released some cardinal slides CD and installer, which consists of CD, which can be run as a live CD and also install a completely localized system. They didn't use Damian as for the installer, for the ready at this moment. So they used Morkex installer, very easy to customize and translate. And they integrated application and their work to upstream. So their old translation work done on modular, open-office.org, et cetera, has been pushed to the upstream in modular, open-office, et cetera. And they assembled the CD. So this was launch on... Okay, so sorry for the photo, but you barely see nothing, so I'll describe the photo. On June 2nd, 2006, which was very symbolic because this is the King's coronation anniversary. They launched some cardinals very officially, so on this picture you will actually see in the middle around that would be the Ministry of Information of Buddha, the Ministry of Education on the left, and some random guys on the right. Okay, I'll shoot the picture to give you an idea of the attendance. It was a very official event. Actually, we would have... It was planned to have the Prime Minister, but he was not attending, so just to give you an idea of the importance given to this event, it was covered all over the country on TV and what, et cetera, in the newspaper. Okay, this is the official launch. Oh, don't mind it. Send the Ministry picking up a t-shirt. Yeah, I am wearing t-shirts, but don't mind it. Then, later on, after some talks we had during this launch, some training sessions happened in Tipu, in the capital city. Transpoche was invited to stay for two weeks around in Bhutan and give training sessions for the AI customization, task-selling customization, and deviant package building, and all this stuff that's needed to be customized deviant distribution, as you did, by both. And they were to modify tasks more quickly. It was a very successful session. And in a few weeks in July 7th, it was supposed to happen on June 2nd, but they had to delay it. They will launch long car deviant linux. So that will be entirely based on deviant etch. They used a standard graphical installer, just customized the logo, et cetera. I wanted to set up a demo machine, but these crappy Dell machines actually do not boot the deviant graphical installer, so I couldn't be able to set up one. And donkadeviant linux is installable in English or Zonka. So on donkadeviant linux, everything is on one CD. It's not, as far as I know, it's not a live CD. There is a customized task set, and they also have set up, it will be launched very, very soon, you see in the resources, they activated the website in advance, just for us. A full website, and infrastructure, and a different mirror. We will have to check whether this mirror is complete, but it would be nice to add it to the network of deviant mirrors, because listing just boots up in the list of deviant mirrors would be my achievements quite well. There is a big effort in documentation. There are a lot of interesting and user documentation available in Zonka, because the target here is the end user, Moxin-2e, the school, and every people. So what did we do? We did some localization work on the norm. Donkadeviant linux is based on the norm. Open up the control, modulate under the file, and very important, as far as I saw over there, is the name, because they like to chat over the internet, and you can actually chat with them in Zonka. That's very interesting to think. You can't do it with ERC I don't think so. They also worked a lot on rendering engines, the basis for all these applications work. There is support for Zonka in Fango, Moxin-2e. Targeted with norm, and on the new target for the Mozilla familiar project, as far as I know. Someone disagree, needs, great end. What's most interesting, they always contributed back to both Vivian and all free software projects. They contributed in Zonka forms, which are the ones we use also in our old graphic program, they contributed back to good methods, rendering engines, and also all their translations go upstream. That sounds pretty obvious, but this is really a philosophy they have to share back to the community. The future plans are to develop MD6 before and policy support, Splashboot. I thought things about Splashboot yesterday at the EIPOC meeting because here the argument is to just tell, well, you know, the farmer in his country, the teacher in a school lost no valet somewhere, they want to have a nice boot just this. So, at my Splashboot they want to do it with whatever thing we need, with a monk suit, wondering around, you know. To more seriously, country-wide training. That's a big program to do trainings of government officials from the ministry, the team to change. They have now the youngest student in the world, very clever with information technology. So I wouldn't be surprised very soon the king of Bhutan uses Debian. The king of Bhutan runs Debian. Their students are also very clever about information technology. They have probably the students that travel the most over the world. The monks. Yeah, monks in the monastery. Of course, Bhutan is a Buddhist cultural country. So everything related to Buddhists is very important and compiling and being able to keep sacred texts written in the Sonka script is very important all over the country. And the private IT vendor also, the development of IT is amazing in input. So these people need to be trained to use Sonka and not only take everything on English. So, for instance, they plan to use in monasteries and they really plan to use in monasteries. Fema told me that don't call him a priest, at least using one monastery country, not just one which is the most famous chemist one in Taksan monastery. He could be and keep track of sacred texts. Well, one has to imagine he could priest. There are prayer flags all over the mountains, you see prayer flags written by hand. And why not bring them now? We don't call him a priest. So, there are a lot of plans actually to use this distribution. Other side, it's set up a lot of resources. Of course, I don't expect you to copy this report, but it's quite interesting to see that I have a brochures manual in both English and Sonka. What's interesting to see is what's the IT. The IT is a different kind of information technology. The military information is within charge of this project. And it should happen to go on the website of the IT. You'll see a lot of information about development of Sonka people information technology. Actually, let's take this video and to the moment I say your kutu tam po just thank you for attending. So, here it's written kutu tam po. They also say kutu tam po to all the partners of this project, most international partners, Department of Information of Country Partners, Department of Information Technology, Department of Development of Sonka, the Czech College most translated from this college International Partners, IDSE, International Development and Research Corporation. I remember based in Canada who funded this project and the so called foundation project interesting to give a word about this project. This is funded by IDSE and it's aimed to develop the support for South Asia and Eastern Asia languages in computing. So, it spread all over the country, kutu tam, Pakistan, Thailand, several parts of India as a member, for instance in Paris we don't call it new distribution has been launched also which is called NEPAL for NEPAL using the NEPAL language named NEPALi which is surprisingly also there on Demian. How much of you are there? The developers I mentioned here the translators Pimagire is in charge of the whole project and he again apologised to not being able to attend and talk to about Sonka and it's much, much better than so all these people really all these people really want to thank the Demian project for all your work all the hard work done because this hard work gives the result of them being able to build their national customized distribution so again kutu tam, and I think we can say that also so would you like to try saying kutu tam, kutu are both of these people do you have any questions? Much as possible just for the because everybody wants to see me so for the fun during the question session I just want a few pictures most of these pictures are hoping me or Frans both more than me because they stay much longer than me in the country actually just one question if you look now back for this whole project you would be at the beginning again what would you have learned from it or did just everything work right as it was and if you would now okay I'd like to actually if you would start such a project now again what would you do different or just everything well just most things work so well just well that's a good move yeah so I tried to speak in name of Bema Mo in my own name of course because the project is there and not mine I think most probably starts from the beginning there was a boy this type using Mophics installer which was very hacky and quite wacky I think from the beginning it worked with Delian work with Delian maybe much more closer they discovered quite late that we are quite involved in an organization work and quite motivated to do it so that could be probably the change the main change they would do from the Delian point of view what could we have done better maybe train or work on training session earlier probably it would have been good to have the training session with a transport earlier so that they could more work on directly on Delian but we have to spread the knowledge and it's actually easy you just need to find someone with enough skills enough time wanting to go one or two weeks and that's easy to achieve because it's an amazing company it's an amazing place well I don't know if the photo give you an idea but this is one of the countries in the world who cares the most for environment they are covered with products and there are no projects but they use the products and they are only used for energy is hydroelectric electricity there's a big concern over there for environment other questions and about this with a mic how many of them are in NM how many maintainers are countries in NM actually 0 there are some at some moment should enter your maintenance group that would be a little bit frightening for him if I can try speaking on his behalf but I think for my opinion the difference is have the people for this so it's just a matter of time I think well like I had a few questions about this well I mean you know sometimes when you when you react to people business people they are all talking about the total cost of ownership server, machine etc but this project is really interesting because finally you can see where free software actually helps to solve problems where there are no many to make anyway so commercial models are interesting and it's great to see where free software can really help in this case and I was curious about how did they made contact with did they jump from the AC and said hey well we don't want to make our own distribution but what is this process actually actually don't remember how we did that in touch with Pema and others it's probably happened quite naturally because we tend to think that that is hydrated and there are a low bandwidth for internet but yeah not isolated at all most of the young people and people a lot most of the people I met over there are currently attending courses and those studies in the US or the ones in Europe I had I could speak trans with a few people over there so it's amazing to see how developed and how the country is going fast with the information technology age because they are not very widely developed country but not isolated and there is a big will to just go this way a bit of a political will especially by the king the king's son now very famous all over Asia because the new king of Vietnam is very famous among old Thai girls because he is very nice yeah with the old deep respect I owe to him of course so this is all this that makes this happen this was the basis of the talk I had to give over there this is just what we all do we are working for we want this to achieve and the best reward is to see that our work is going this way how well does Junker fit with software used for science and mathematics to be honest with you how would they plan to use that software using Junker for science and mathematics or they using this that's point of challenge to answer I'm not very sure I have the answer they probably plan to develop support for education material first of all the first need is to have tools to support the language to teach it in schools the point is to have support for the language first learn language the main danger for the language and culture is the invasion of English very easy to speak English all the time in dimplesity because everybody I wouldn't say everybody in the country in capital city is quite clever and very knowledgeable in English for the main danger is I don't know if they are plans for higher education for support in science, software, mathematics and other like that could be just a matter of doing it we have any effect on neighboring countries these experience will have any effect on neighboring countries we have to adopt they are I mentioned the development of Nepal Linux Nepal Linux in Nepal they developed because put on the the book very same work in parallel the people from Nepal Linux were invited at the launch so this doesn't have any effect but this is the same movement of all over there all over South Asia actually to develop their own national solution based on free software India is of course a good example a huge country 1 billion people also official languages and most of them not supported by commercial product or badly supported or whatever so India there are many many programs all over India in the states to develop localized evolution in Tamil in Malayalam in Kucharati I don't know many of them, Kavunaka who is listening to us could probably tell more about this so this is quite a judgment woman quite similar to the one you have in in Latin America with different here the language support in Latin America we have countries that are very isolated like we also have countries like Venezuela that are a little heavy and very good these are the very future free software maybe there come 20 where we are organized in both okay if you listen to me just prepare we have time for one question if you stay long you mentioned the plans for educational software do you know that they are already even a new project do you have a list of actors that are really used at this level or set up a support analogy so question was are they aware of the Indian education yes that was one of the points of them asking me to come it was to talk about the general movement of the software and I remember mentioning the Indian education efforts during my talk I remember well so it's just a matter of getting in touch I think either from their side or from the Indian education side that would be a lot of work probably because again localization and support for input method complex language there is a lot of work but they are definitely interested the two ministers who attended the launch where the minister of information and the minister of education so just call to enable the input methods it's more complex than for Japanese because I want to carry on with the installation because I know you already did that so I think that's more complex than that just a few people specialists of this there are a lot of them all over this part I mentioned again but I think one of the best specialists of this thing just a matter of getting in touch with the man just bringing him somewhere he can do the module after the internationalization so there are the people there are projects just a matter of stop I think we're running out of time so thank you again for your attention and let's come to a good end