Hi, Anna: Good to see you back here on the Speakup list. Also, good to see you're posting using Pine. I guess you've got some things working! <grin> That's good. Now, what next? I think the magic might be hiding behind a door marked "focus on something." Can we pick something specific to focus on? What would that be? Here are some thoughts: Writing and editing text. You're already doing this since you're sending mail from Pine. By default, pine uses a text editor called pico. So, if you just type pico at your shell prompt, you'll find you're in the same composer. You can create text files and then save them with pico's commands. Ifyou do 'man pico' I think you'll find this man pageis not at all intimidating. And, anything you create in pico you can later read with more advanced editors like emacs and vim. So, there's every reason to get 100% comfortable with pico. Need a step up from pico because you want search and replace? Nano would be a great next step. We can talk about that if you like. How about web browsing? Are you comfortable with lynx yet? Does your lynx show web pages in a blind friendly way, or is the cursor parked at the lower right of the screen? Press the small key in the middle of the bottom row of keys on the numeric keypad to find out. If it says something like "line 25 position 80" we have to make some configuration changes. It's worth making these changes not just for web pages, though. Lynx is a great way to look at files in your home directory. When you do: lynx . you get all the files in your home directory. You can arrow up and down through them, and you can quickly check what's in those files, and come back to the list with the right arrow and left arrow keys respectively. If it's a file you want to throw away, just press 'r' and, boom, it's gone. But, does your lynx show a lot of permissions, size, date and time stuff before reading the filename? That's the default, and it's not at all blind friendly. We can fix that, if you like. Just give the word, and I'll dredge up the syntax, or just send you a default configuration file that's more blind friendly. You mentioned the Red Hat documentation CD ROM. Yes, you need to first extract the files there onto your hard disk. That involves using a command called tar. It's easiest just to tell you how to do that. Remember this tip, because you'll need it over and over and over and over and over and over ... tar xzpf [file.name] If the file ends in .tar.gz or .tgz, and tar -xjpf if it ends in .tar.bz2 or .tbz Of course the [file.name] part above is a tad tricky too. You must first mount the cd rom, probably: mount /mnt/cdrom and then you must path your command to that file system--something like: tar xzpf /mnt/cdrom/Getting_Started [tab] Now, notice where I put [tab]. If you press the tab key after typing part of a command name or file name or file path, linux will fill out the rest for you. If you get a beep instead, either you need to type more to choose between a couple of options (files that start with the same letters, for example), or you did something incorrectly and might as well bail out with Ctrl-C and start over. Now, you'll need lynx to read the files in the directory the above tar command creates, so we'd best get your lynx configured to be very blind friendly before we go at this task. -- 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
