Does Vinux support braille? Does it have the capacity to run Gnome with Orca? John On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 08:10:44AM -0600, Martin McCormick wrote: > Over the Newyear's weekend, I tried yet another > distribution of Debian Linux that talks. It is called vinux and > the vi part stands for "visually impaired." It uses speakup as > its software speech engine and it runs a text console. This > means that it gives new life to middle-aged computers that > aren't top-end but are too good to get rid of yet. > > The live CD comes up talking and gives you a Unix > console. There is a menu system to get you started on how to > install vinux on your hard drive. > > It is good for anybody who has some working knowledge of > Linux or any other common form of Unix. It appears that you must > have either 256 megs of RAM or that must swap space on your > drive. I tried it on an extremely RAM-deficient Gateway system > which is about 13 years old and > made the mistake of being too cheap on swap space. The system > had 64 megs of RAM and 189 megs of swap. The speech came up fine > but I knew we had trouble when it began repeating various error > messages followed by "no space left on device." Each of those > represented a package that didn't make it on to the new system. > > I increased the swap space to about 256 megs today and > it appeared to do much better. > > The fellow who created this distribution appears to have > done things well in that the speech engine and all the audio > devices play nicely together. I was able to get the mplayer > package to install and run. speechdispatcher and speakup just > talk right over the sound when they need to. > > I installed vinux on a Dell Enspiron laptop with 256 > megabytes of RAM and there was no trouble at all. It just works. > > Now for a couple of warnings. When you install it, you > get a default British keyboard layout. It is the same as ours > for numbers and letters and most punctuation marks, but the @ > sign as in bobby@xxxxxxxxx and the double-quote are swapped. > What should be the \ is the #, and a few other surprises. Also > the Caps-lock key does not announce its status and works much > differently than it usually does under speakup. Set it with > shift-capslock as normal, but release it by just tapping > Caps-lock. The pitch of your echoed key strokes will tell you if > it is set or cleared. Anyway, you can become root on the Live CD > by sudo su - and then run loadkeys us. You get an American > keyboard and, strangely enough, the Caps-lock announces > afterward. This works until you reboot. > > After you install vinux, the process of making the US > keyboard default is complicated a bit because the normal > procedure of running install-keymap us is slightly broken. It > puts the US map in /etc/console for some reason instead of > /etc/console-setup. I just got lucky and figured that one out. > You have to manually copy the boottime.kmap.gz file to the right > place and it does start to work. > > It probably doesn't hurt to edit /etc/default/locale to > change LANG to "C" so that dates and other generated output > look normal to us. > > I have been using it on 3 different systems for about a > week and have had no serious issues. I did try a serial RS-232 > port and ckermit on one system and it worked fine. I have not > yet tried the serial PCMCIA serial port on the laptop. I > certainly hope that works as is it is important at times in my > job. > > Anyway, I think this is a welcome addition to Linux > accessibility. Too bad the main distributions don't have it as a > boot option on their distribution CD's. > > Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK > Systems Engineer > OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list -- John J. boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list