Thank you very much.
You've been a great help.
Take care,
Chris Norman
<!-- chris.norman4@xxxxxxxxxxxx -->
----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Chase" <blinux.list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Linux for blind general discussion" <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 23, 2005 2:27 PM
Subject: Re: Introduction to Linux for Chris
Welcome, Chris, to the list.
Can I have some information on Linux's opperation?
[phony accent] vell dis opperation kan be wary difficult, as ve plan to extract schom schpace on hard disken and putten in a bit of der Linuxen. (grins)
No, really..it works, and there's a whole list of folks here to help. It, much like Windows, is acutally fairly boring for your average Joe. What matters are the applications, and how easily you can use them.
Is it totally command line based?
It can be. I've got one of my boxes (an old P133 laptop) set up to run in only command-line. I find it fast, as I've been using the command-line for years. It's one of those things that with experience, you may never want to go back. There's also a GUI portion which is, like everything else in Linux, customizable to the Nth degree. There is some screen-reader software--the GNOME project has Gnopernicus and the KDE project has their own (the name escapes me at the moment) but last I heard, they're still about on par with MS Narrator. If you have some sight, you can tweak your XFree86 configuration to display in a much lower/magnified resolution and take advantage of the built-in panning provided by X's virtual desktops. You can crank the graphics back to 640x480, 320x200, or even lower, yet give it a virtual desktop of 1024x768 or even higher. X takes care of all the panning details. You just ram your mouse against the edge of the screen, and it does the rest. (grins)
is it still open-source?
Yep...always has been, always will be. That's the beauty of the GPL (General Public License)
If so, what language?
This is a bit ambiguous...do you mean programming language or spoken/written language? If it's spoken/written language, Linux supports far more languages than I speak. Some distros are customized for a particular language.
If, however, you're talking about programming languages, there are so many, it would be impossible to enumerate them all. However, for low-level and huge apps, often C or C++ is used. In addition, there's Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Lisp, PHP, shell-scripts, TCL/TK, and surely piles more I'm forgetting. For my personal spin, I prefer to avoid C/C++ when I can, in the same way I avoid assembly programming at work. (grins) For application development, I lean towards Java or Python. For web development, I'm a PHP guy, though Python has its appeal on that front as well. For some reason, Perl just drives me nuts.
Where can I get either the source or bineries from pleasE? and how do I install.
Well, if you truely want to install, you can download any of the ISO images for any number of distributions, or ISOs modified by blinuxy folk, to make them more accessible. I think there's a modified Fedora Core boot ISO that's been tweaked so that the speakup kernel is loaded by default.
As an alternative, if you just want to test the waters first without actually installing, there are a number of boot-from-cd distributions such as Knoppix. One of its derivatives, Oralux (http://www.oralux.org), has been specially tweaked to provide an accessible environment from bootup without the need to install. This might be a good place to start. In addition, you'll likely want to read some docs on getting started with Linux, as it sounds like you've not been steeped in the Linux/Unix world, thus absorbing it in passing. I'd recommend some of your first stops to be:
The Linux Documentation Project: http://www.tldp.org
The Linux Cookbook (one of my favorite resources for command-line tools; very biased towards Debian-based distributions, but that's okay, as I use Debian and its derivatives such as Knoppix) which can be found at:
http://dsl.org/cookbook/cookbook_toc.html
Hopefully that's enough to get you started. The list is here and there are plenty of smart folks to help you out.
-tim
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