The Suse 7.1 or later distro says right on the box that a blind person can install with a braille monitor. Sure enough when I installed Suse on my second harddrive the first thing the installation process looked for was a braille monitor. I don't have a braille monitor or braille pad or whatever but I thought that it was interesting that the message "looking for braille display" flashed on the screen when I first installed Suse. I paid twenty nine dollars for the Suse 7.1 personal version. It's virtually no different from using any other Linux distro once it's installed when you work in the console mode with the exception that it does have a powerful setup tool called yast. I personally think blind people will like yast as it will run while in console mode. Oh by the way there is also yast2 which will run likewise. I tried yast2 in x windows enviroment and I like it much much better running from the console mode. Well anyway to answer the question about the kernel. Suse uses the latest kernel 2.4 or later and it has another big plus. It uses the journaling file system ReiserFS which is super! I know from facts that it runs over ten times faster when reading large files. A friend of mine at the linux user group meeting who has been using Unix and Linux for many years was amazed how much faster ReiserFS was. He also said that yast is heavy duty and a very reliable setup tool. I'm not trying to promote one distro over another per say but I do like the features of Suse very much. I'm slowly going blind and I'm trying many things to prepare myself to help others who are blind to use Linux and so far Suse seems to be on top of the latest technology. Suse is bold to say that the Personal Editon 7.1 is entirely suitable for the blind and I have not seen anything to the contrary. I found this info out some months ago while I was reading Linux Today news when they announced the first distro for the blind. That's when I went to Best Buy to buy my copy of Suse Linux Personal Edition 7.1. I just installed it about two weeks ago after I bought a second harddrive to install it on. I'm impressed to say the least. The Weaving Beaver rclowdus at kcnet.com "Chop your own firewood and it will warm you twice." "Weave your own cloth and it will reward you twice." On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Gary M. Drennan wrote: > Hello everybody! > > Can anyone tell me how critical the kernal version is to Speakup? I'm > looking for a Linux dist, and I keep on running into ver. 2.2. > > Also, are there any plans for a Keynote hardware speech synth soon? I have a > BrailleNote and am naturally interested. > > Thanks, > > Gary Drennan > Assistive Technology Solutions > "Working together to help make all things possible" > > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup >
