Before you use it, you need to know that there are some features in the Windows version that are not present in the Linux version! So be sure to check out our “WeSay Known Issues” below before you start.

WeSay Linux Install

STATUS:
We are currently preparing WeSay 1.1 packages for Ubuntu. Until then there are no packages available for that version.

Installing WeSay on Ubuntu Linux (Lucid) – Long Term Stable Release

1. Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://packages.sil.org/ubuntu lucid main
deb http://packages.palaso.org/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://packages.palaso.org/ubuntu lucid main

2. Add the repository security key

wget http://packages.palaso.org/ubuntu/palaso_pub.key -O- | sudo apt-key add -

3. Update your package list

sudo apt-get update

4. Install WeSay

sudo apt-get install wesay

This will install menu items under Application | Office

WeSay Linux Known Issues

There are some issues with WeSay on Linux. You can see a full list of known issues here.
Major Features Not Working

The following major features present in the Windows version of WeSay are not yet working on WeSay for Linux.

• Display of Non-Roman scripts.
• Audio recording.
• Dictionary preview direct to pdf (Though print direct to OpenOffice is available).
• There are issues with copy and paste for characters outside the ascii range.

Current Linux progrss:

You can see the latest progress on our Trello board.

WeSay Linux Short Term Plan

• Release beta packages for WeSay 1.1
• Fix some of the Linux specific bugs listed in the WeSay bug tracker.

WeSay Linux Medium Term Plan

• Add audio support
• Add support for non roman scripts via Pango / Graphite

Contributing to WeSay

We welcome patches and contributions from the community.
If you are a developer and would like to get started with WeSay on Linux you may find our Developer Notes useful.

Linux Email Setup for bug reporting

WeSay uses the default email client setup on your system. This allows you to send email however you choose, using whatever email client you choose. Further, it allows WeSay to queue an email in your ‘outbox’ so that it can be sent later if you are not currently connected to the internet.

Evolution

Ubuntu comes with the email program ‘Evolution’ as a standard feature. It is setup as the default email client automatically. You should not need to change any settings if you are using Evolution for email.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is another popular email client for Ubuntu. After installation however, it is not automatically set to be the default email client. You will need to change it in your preferences as described below.

HowTo: Change the Default Email Client

1. Select System | Preferences | Preferred Applications
2. Choose you preferred mail reader from the Mail Reader section of the Internet tab.

If you are a tester, you can check out Testers Notes on the latest WeSay builds.

Display glosses in Gather by Semantic Domain Task

If you configure this task so that users can enter a gloss (in addition to the vernacular word), the gloss will now show up, in grey, under the word in the list. An advisor requested this as it helps him see what is being gathered.

Correct spelling in collection tasks

In most cases, selecting and editing a word in the collection tasks now causes its spelling to be changed rather than creating a new entry.

New Image Toolbox

Importing and Image

Previously, WeSay supported selecting images from the Art Of Reading collection via search (starting, automatically, by looking for pictures that match the gloss). Now when you click to add an image,  the Image Toolbox opens, and lets you:

• Scan in a drawing
• Get a picture from your camera
• Choose an image from Art of Reading (as before)
• Choose a file from your file system (as before)

Intellectual Property

For any of these images, WeSay now can read and write metadata about the image: the illustrator, copyright, and license. For the license, you can answer a few questions and WeSay will select a nice Creative Commons license to match your wishes. This meta data will be invisibly embedded in the image itself, so that this information will be readable now and in the future by other tools which understand image metadata.

Cropping

The Image Toolbox has a very simple cropping tool, built-in.

New Art Of Reading Download

SIL has recently granted a Creative Commons License for Art Of Reading, and Palaso has created a downloadable installer for the collection. Just install it, and suddenly Bloom and WeSay will be able to use it. Naturally, our version has all the metadata embedded: the illustrator (where known), Copyright, Creative Commons license, and keywords.

Delete input systems

You can now delete input systems. Associated data can either be deleted as well or it can be merged into another input system.

Improved help

Hit the F1 key to get context sensitive help anywhere in WeSay. Have a question? please let us know and we will see about adding the answer to the help files!

Resumable Send/Receive

If a Send/Receive operation is interrupted it will resume where it left off on the next attempt.

Printing Custom Fields in “Make PDF Dictionary”

As always, we recommend using FLEx/Pathways for your final print jobs, and the “Make PDF Dictionary” for one-click drafts. Starting with this version, if you name your custom field “plural” it will now show up in the PDF dictionary. Other custom fields can now be added as well, but at this point, this can only be done by adding an entry in the “customlayout.css” stylesheet in the export folder. Check out the end of the “Autolayout.css” file to see how it was done for “plural”, or ask for help if you need a custom stylesheet.

Do you have videos or other materials you could share with the rest of us?

Improved FLEx Collaboration

We have made various changes to smooth the process of sharing data with FLEx. Internally, these have required a lot of work, but on the surface, you won’t see much of a change.

Completely new “Input Systems” tab

In the Configuration Tool, the old “Writing Systems” tab has been replaced with an “Input Systems” one which is both easier and more powerful. For example, adding a system to hold ipa or audio recordings is now done with a single click.

Indonesian “Art Of Reading”

When you click “Find Picture” to choose and image from “Art Of Reading”, you can now type in Indonesian search terms

Send/Receive Improvements

The Send/Receive system now offers more help when it detects common problems, like a mistyped password.

You can now set up Send/Receive with a LAN server/networked drive.

Usability Improvements

Previously, if WeSay could not figure out what project to open, it just told you “sorry”. Now, it tells you “Welcome to WeSay” and then runs the Configuration Tool, where you can find the project or create a new one.

Configuration Tool hand-off to WeSay

Previously, it was possible to leave the WeSay Configuration Tool running while you ran WeSay; this could lead to confusion and potentially lost changes. Now, when you click “Open in WeSay”, the Configuration Tool closes first.  Then, in order to make it easy to get back to the Configuration tool, a “Configure this project…” button appears at the bottom of the WeSay window.  Note: when you run WeSay any other way, this button is hidden, since you don’t normally want WeSay users messing with the configuration.  As before, you can still right-click on the WeSay Home page to get that same command.

Printing Improvement

A team in language with digraphs (“th”, “ng”) wanted words starting with these letters to be grouped together. Note, it is not enough to make them sort together; we need a way for you to explicitly identify these clusters of letters. Doing that should eventually be part of setting up an input system. But for now, you can identify them by listing the multigraphs, one-per-line, in a file named “multigraphs.txt” in the “export” directory of the WeSay project.

Bug Fixes

Fixed: homographs that were collected in the same session using the “Gather By Wordlist” task not saved, if you quit before going to another task.

Fixed: Spell checking not enabled for meaning field in gather by Semantic Domains

Fixed: In fields configuration control there were enabled settings that don’t make sense for the current datatype, or were not appropriate to change for built-in fields.

Fixed: When a language project had spaces in its name,  Notes didn’t work.

Fixed: Language projects could not be stored in a folder with unicode characters in the name.

1. Set up a LanguageDepot.org account
2. Open a new project on LanguageDepot.org
3. Bring all the data together
4. Update to the latest WeSay
5. Push (Send) the dictionary to the Internet
6. Pull (Receive) it back down to your computer again
7. Pull it down from the Internet to all collaborators’ computers
8. Start collaborating!

1. Get yourself a LanguageDepot.org Account

Go to Language Depot and create yourself an account.

Please don’t use the same password you use for anything important… WeSay is NOT going to be careful about keeping your password well-hidden.

2. Get a LanguageDepot.org Project for the Language

Write to admin@languagedepot.org.  Please provide the following information:

• That you will be using WeSay
• The name of the account you created in the previous step
• The name of the project.  Normally, the name of the language works well for this.
• The ISO 639-3 code for the language.  Easiest way to find that is via the Ethnologue.

We will do three things:

1) Create the language project

2) Give you manager permissions on that project.  With those permissions, you will be able to assign additional contributors to the project, and turn features of the web site on and off.

People you have not added to the project will not be able to access your data.  However, we wouldn’t pretend to promise any real “security”.  If you need that, it’s perfectly OK to use a Mercurial server somewhere else… you aren’t tied to LanguageDepot.org.

Unless you tell us otherwise, we’ll assume it is OK for us to occasionally look at the files in your repository project for the purpose of fixing a problem for you or seeing how the collaboration features are being used in real projects.

Make sure you backup the WeSay project before embarking on any major change like this.

3. Get the Data Together

It’s important that there is a single, up-to-date copy of the dictionary when you first put it up on Language Depot.  If there is currently only a single person working on the dictionary, you need to get their project, and delete the project from their computer.  That does two good things: ensures they don’t keep working on it, and ensures that they will be using the proper version of the project later.

If there are multiple copies of the dictionary out there, you need to do that for each one of them.  That is, get the project, remove it from their computer.  You have an extra step in this case, which is to merge the entries together.  Read these instructions on merging LIFT files.

Edit Sept 2012:

When the above was written, Send/Receive was brand new. If your team is already using Send/Receive, you do not need to get down to a single copy of the project. However, you will need to eventually set up each user’s WeSay to sync with LanguageDepot (that is, each user that will be syncing that way). Instructions for that below.

4. Get the Most Recent Version of WeSay

The stuff shown here requires version 0.7 of WeSay, or greater.  Get the latest on the WeSay Downloads Page.

5. Push the project up to LanguageDepot

Ok, once you have a single dictionary folder with the whole team’s data, it’s time to do the initial push up to LanguageDepot.

First, run the Configuration Tool, and Open your project.

Go to “Actions”, and scroll until you see Send/Receive:

Click that button with the two arrows, and you should see:

Now click “Set Up”, and fill in the account details from the email you received from us.

Click “OK”.  Now, the Internet button becomes available, labeled with the name of the server you will be synchronizing with.

Notice that the “Set Up” button disappeared. This is intentional.  We want to decrease the chance that a user will accidentally mess up his/her ability to do a send/receive by messing up their account information. Therefore, once set up, WeSay hides that Set Up button.  Notice that hovering over the button reveals the trick for getting it back, if you really need to change your account settings:

Click “Internet”, and if all your account settings are correct, your project will be pushed up to the LanguageDepot server.

6. Set up any of your teammates who already have the project on their computers

Will anyone else on the team be Send/Receiving with LanguageDepot.org? Then they need accounts too. You can make an account for each one if you like, and assign them to the project under the “members” tab. Note, if you don’t want to bother creating one for each person, they can all share one account. The history logs will still show their individual names. For example, for Tok Pisin Dictionary project, I could create a “tpiContributor” account, and just give out that name and the password that goes with it.

You already know how to make accounts on LanguageDepot. And once you’re a manager of your project, go to the “members” tab for your project and assign new accounts to your team.  Until you do that, these new accounts won’t have permission to Send or Receive.

Next, on each of the other people’s computers who need to Send/Receive with LanguageDepot, go back to step 5 and tell their WeSay about LanguageDepot, using the account you make for them.

7. Pull the project down to the computers of your colleagues

Run the WeSay Configuration Tool, and click “Get From Internet”:

As before, we enter the account information. See the note in (6) about making accounts for your team members.

And click Download.

7. Begin Collaborating

You’ll notice a Send/Receive button now shows up on the dashboard:

Clicking it there will show a dialog like this:

Clicking “Internet” starts the synchronization:

Note: when WeSay detects that some changes were pulled down from the internet, it closes down and restarts itself so that it has a nice clean start with the new data.

In the following screenshot, notice the circled buttons.  We’d click the left-most to add a new question to this entry.  The other button represents a previous, unresolved question. A click on it brings up a dialog box in which we can read and answer the question.

Ok, but how do you find which entries have unresolved notes?  WeSay 0.7 also introduces the Notes Browser, which lets you find and interact with notes from all over the dictionary:

In addition to Questions, WeSay currently supports just one other kind of note, the Merge Conflict.  These are created by the automatic merger when two team members edit the same field at the same time. Unlike traditional version control systems, Chorus (the engine we’ve written to do all this) doesn’t stop the merge and force you to deal with the problem immediately.  Instead, it makes its best guess as to what to do, then creates a Merge Conflict Note which the team can read and deal with when it is ready.

If you don’t like what the merger did, go the entry and make whatever changes are necessary. Then click the “resolved” box to show that this has been dealt with. Or if you need to discuss what to do with a teammate, add a new message to the note. In the following screenshot, I’ve highlighted the hyperlink at the top, and the Resolved box at the bottom.

These show up on the dashboard under the “review” section:

The history show you all the changes the team has made:

Those familiar with WeSay will notice that the history screen is more complex than what we expect many WeSay users to handle.  Use your own discretion. It may be that you, the advisor, will want this enabled in your configuration, but not in that of the rest of the team.

In the next series of posts, I’ll walk through the basics of setting up your dictionary project so that team members can synchronize their work with each other.  We’ll see how to do this using a USB flash drive, server on a local network, or the internet.  We’ll look at two optional features: viewing the complete history of who did what, and having chat-like conversations about an individual entry.

Getting Started with Dictionary Collaboration

Dictionary Collaboration using USB flash drives

Viewing the History Of Changes

Using Collaboration Notes

Dictionary Collaboration using the Internet

Handling Collaboration Conflicts

The simplest case is where the users have been working on completely different sets of words, with no overlap. That is, they each started with completely empty dictionaries, which have never once been merged together.  In this specific case, you can merge them by hand.  Do that by opening each .lift file and copying all the <entry>…</entry> chunks of one file in next to the <entry>…</entry> chunks of the other file.    Open in WeSay to make sure you didn’t mess the lift file up.

In the more general case, you will want to merge them together using FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx).  To do that, follow these steps:

1) Create a new project using FLEx.

2) Import each .lift file into the project, one at a time, until you have a nice combined dictionary.

If getting/installing/using FLEx seems like to much, you can always just ask for someone to do this for you.  Write to the WeSay email list and ask someone to do the merge for you.

In another case, we might want to set a user up to add voice recordings of example sentences. But the task should only show example sentences where someone had previously entered in the example text.

The latest development release (0.5 build 2000) addresses this.  When you first create a project, tasks are configured to have the same behavior as before: an entry will be chosen if *any* of the writing systems assigned to that field are empty.

You can now limit the task to filling in the vernacular (gaw, in this example):

In addition, we can limit the task to only those entries where some other writing system has already been filled in:

Thanks, Mark, for taking the time to submit this request.  We would appreciate any feedback you can give us on this feature.  Does it work well for you?

The obvious next step would be to add a way make duplicates of some tasks, so that you could have both an “Add Examples” and an “Add Example Recordings” task.  This is now possible by editing the .wesayconfig file in a text editor.  If you want to know how, set me an message (hattonjohn at gmail).  That will tell me how much demand there is for it, and if there’s enough, we’ll make it easier.