Michael Prokop wrote: > * Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net> wrote: > > >> The 1.1rc1 that I used has a relatively old version from cvs and I >> honestly can no longer recommend grml. >> > > Your "I honestly can no longer recommend grml" is a slap into my face. > Hi, My no longer recommending grml has nothing to do with Speakup support. Actually what attracted me to grml was just that. I really like Debian but I don't like no official support for Speakup in the kernel or installer. My reason for not recommending grml is that it installs literally hundreds of packages that I didn't need and aren't necessary. The problem was that by the time I got to a login prompt, I was practically out of memory. I couldn't do much because the computer would lock up. Once I removed the many unnecessary daemons and got my system as close to a vanilla Debian system as possible, my problems went away. Unfortunately that meant removing every trace of grml and all the custom packages. While I'm here, I'll try to anticipate your response. You're probably going to say that you can deselect groups of packages in the grml2hd installer. that might be true, but said installer doesn't work well with Speakup at least as of 1.1rc1. I know of another person who had the same trouble. Both him and I needed sighted help to do the actual installation. Basically the problem is that the arrows don't tell me what the cursor is actually on, even when highlight tracking is on in Speakup. I'll hear, for example, that I'm installing to hda1 when in fact the cursor is on hda2. I wouldn't have known this without sighted help. By the time I got to the package selection, I was frustrated and just wanted to get something working. I have two other small complaints. One is that I don't see why Speakup can't be included in the small or medium versions. I don't want or need RAID, USB, LVM, SCSI, etc support. I don't need software running as daemons which will try to crack other network sites. I don't need Apache, Postfix, or an ftp server. I would rather install grml-small or grml-medium and install the other packages that I want from Debian. I can see why you wouldn't include Speakup in grml-small since the point is to be as small as possible, but I don't see why you couldn't include it in grml-medium. With all of that said, I'm sorry that you feel insulted. I didn't know you are reading this list or I would have elaborated at the time. I obviously haven't used the final 1.1 release so hopefully some of these things have been addressed already. I can say that there are some things about grml that I really like a lot. One is the concentration on text tools. In fact, I ended up giving up on installing X and Gnome because it wouldn't work no matter what, especially with the grml-x script. There are enough console tools included that I haven't really needed X and I figured I would wait until I have a machine with more memory. For a live CD, it is very complete and replaces the old rescue floppies of the past. Again, the big attraction to me is that I could have speech at boot with Speakup. Until the package and installer issues are fixed, I can't recommend it though. One thing that would be helpful is to list the memory requirements somewhere online or during the installation. I wouldn't have installed it if I would have realized the memory issues. Finally, I realize that there is little you can do about it, but your download server is very slow. Perhaps there are mirroring services out there which would be better.
