Charles: A couple of things about this: 1.) My experience with vendor installed linux is that they often don't install alll the packages I need. I have seen this with my IBM laptop, which came with Caldera 2.4 Desktop preinstalled, and with Redhat 7.0 (my own installation), when I selected the "laptop" install. I have reverted to doing custom installs. My experience is that the default vendor installs are skewed toward the gui (not surprisingly) and that, therefore, various console utilities are missing. Now, one can certainly add these by hand, but it's just easier to install them up front and not mess with some vendor's idea of what you should have; 2.) It is unlikely hp (or any other vendor) will speech-enable their linux installs until these are part of the distributions themselves--until speakup is part of Redhat, Debian, Slackware, etc. That's the effort that will pay off best, imho; 3.) We may not actually want to speech enable your server. Radical as that sounds, speakup does slow down the computer, in my experience. Kirk, may not agree, but this is my experience, and that of several others. Let me defend this suggestion by asking why we would put speech on the machine if we're going to locate it at some server farm were we're never going to see it? All administration will be done over the wire--so the machine should be built optimized for access over the wire, and not for access on a local console, imho; Just my two cents on this. Glad to see that you're getting more comfortable about the commercial viability of linux, though! <big grin> On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Charles Crawford wrote: > I don't know what others may know about this, but I was impressed when I > went over to the HP.com page to discover they have linux servers and > desktops for sale. Very interesting indeed. Now I need to contact them > and make sure they have the versions that support speech. Maybe, we could > actually get them to offer speech interface as a feature when prchasing is > made? > > -- Charlie. > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup > -- Janina Sajka, Director Technology Research and Development Governmental Relations Group American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) Email: janina at afb.net Phone: (202) 408-8175 Chair, Accessibility SIG Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF) http://www.openebook.org Will electronic books surpass print books? Read our white paper, Surpassing Gutenberg, at http://www.afb.org/ebook.asp Download a free sample Digital Talking Book edition of Martin Luther King Jr's inspiring "I Have A Dream" speech at http://www.afb.org/mlkweb.asp Learn how to make accessible software at http://www.afb.org/accessapp.asp
