"Joel Zimba" <jzimba@erols.com> writes: > My thought is this. Assume there's such a thing as a generic computer out > there... which there is starting to be: > > some kind-o-pentium with a processor from severa vendors (yes yes, I know > pentium means intel, but linux isn't that picky) > if we assume a generically huge hard disk and of course a sound card, how > complex would the cm be to come up with a distribution or just a bootable cd > (problem in itself) that would at least talk out of the box... I once did a bootable live CD with tmpfs and brltty. WOrked quite well. DId that using the nice debian system. Basicly, you just use debootstrap to make a chroot system, chroot into it, and set it up until all the packages you like/need are there, and the config is right. Then you check the size again, maybe add/remove something, and make a bootable image out of it using mkisofs. That worked, and was basicly work of about 5 hours. The more problematic areas are: Repartitioning, hardware detection. 1. Repartitioning is what most users who switch need. Nearly no one buys a extra computer for Linux experiments these days, and a second hard disk isnt always availablle too. Hardware detection: You talked about soundcards, yeah. For most of them, including all drivers in the kernel on the CD works fine, some others need tweaking which isnt simple if the thing is on a CD. Also, it would be nice to have a simple braille driver detection program, separate from all those different screen readers. That prog should just scan ttyS0-3 and probably even the USB bus for a braille display and return an identification strhing. This that tool, one could build a nice autodetecting braille driver start script. Same applies for voice synths of course... > recorded .wavs would be less desirable then tts, but might do in a pinch... > at least enough to bootstrap someone... preferably without having to own > various kinds of somewhat compatible assistive technology products. Yeah, the idea of a soundcard as synth is good. But we shouldn't forget about people actually having some asssistive technologies hardware. > It woulden't even have to be a full system, but it must easily migrate to a > full installation. I can only say, debian! Didnt find any other distro which has such a nice upgrade process. > I'm thinking maximize stability and do our best to keep the change > monsters from getting out of control. Reading that sentence, its probably better to try to work at debian boot-floppies for a voice install? Then, we could integrate that effort into debian itself very easily, and wouldnt need to care about maintaining the other packages (keeping them up-to-date...) > just imagine a free or inexpensive cd shoved into a dirt cheap computer ($50 > for a reasonably powerful machine these days) and bang, net access... and > alll the gnu software you could want. As I said, a live bootable CD is easy. Just try it yourself. -- CYa, Mario