Hi: Firstly, you can't telnet from one operating system to another on the same computer as both would need to be running which is not possible. Well perhaps it would be if windows was running under VM ware but that's not the situation currently. The difference between speakup and emacspeak is that emacspeak runs under emacs. As such, you need to also learn how to use emacs before you can use emacspeak. Speakup is a screen reader for linux in general and is somewhat like ASAP in nature. You've come along at the right time - a dectalk express driver is in development at the moment. I don't know what the state of it is at this exact moment but I've heard some positive comments about it. What will almost certainly be the most daunting thing about getting speakup installed for you will be the kernel recompilation. This is actually quite straight-forward but it looks scary. Actually before I go on, what version of debian are you running, do you know? The other tricky part is going to be downloading speakup and getting it onto your system if you don't have speech. If you don't yet have a working PPP or other net connection, this could be tricky, though I guess you could download them in windows and put them on a floppy and copy them back under linux. In brief, this is what you will have to do: 1. Download speakup 0.08 and the new drivers set from ftp.braille.uwo.ca/pub/linux/speakup 2. If you don't have a copy of the kernel source for kernel 2.2.6 or higher, get one. I believe 2.2.15 is about to be released if not already. This is available from kernel.org and numerous other places. Note that if you do already have one unpacked and ready to go, skip to step 4. 3. Unpack the linux kernel sources in /usr/src. If you got a tar.gz file, the command will be tar -zxf linux-2.2.14.tar.gz presuming you and the file are both in /usr/src. Of course, the filename will depend on the kernel version you download. 4. Copy the speakup tar.gz file to /usr/src and unpack it in the same way. 5. Patch speakup into the kernel source. Make sure you're in /usr/src then type: patch -p0 <speakup-0.08/speakup-0.08-patch This process changes the kernel source to suit speakup. Note that one hunk will fail. This is a MIPS-related hunk and doesn't matter. Note that if more fail then something is wrong. 6. Copy newdrv.tar.gz into /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/speakup and then change to this directory and unpack it. This installs the latest driver sources, including the dec express driver. 7. If you've compiled these kernel sources before, remove defkeymap.c from the /usr/src/linux/drivers/char directory as this will be replaced during compilation. Note that I think this is the right name, someone please correct this if I'm wrong. 8. Change back up to /usr/src/linux. Now here is the fun part. If you've compiled these sources before, you should be able to simply do a make oldconfig and you'll merely be asked about speakup. If you've never compiled a kernel before, you might want to read up a bit on it and be sure what hardware you have in your system, as you'll be asked about all of it. In the middle of all this, the process will ask about whether you want speakup (of course you do), and what synth you want. 9. After this, what people type tends to vary. This is what I type and it works for me. I'd like to see a definitive list as to what all the options for make actually do: make dep make clean (not necessary if you've compiled these sources before) make bzImage (note the capital I) After this one, go make yourself a coffee and relax unless you're running a real fast processor. If you have modules in your kernel type: make modules make modules_install I then type: make bzlilo and it should be ready to reboot. Hold your breath and type "restart". I realise you probably want more detail than this but I thought it a good idea to give you some idea of what you're in for. Feel free to post more questions. Feel free also to download speak-freely and ask us in person about all this if you don't understand any of it. Geoff.
