I am going to download the talking CD images mentioned earlier this year on this list and have another go at a laptop I have that is really touchy about getting a talking Linux installation. This was my wife's laptop until she got a Mac a couple of years ago and it did run Windows XP as well as any system runs Windows. It has 256 megs of RAM and a 1-gig processor so it is no slouch but it is about 6 years old now. As luck would have it, the last edition of oralux which was out of date 2 years ago came up crowing and what passed for the HD installation process did install oralux with speakup although most of the bit about enabling speech turned out to be incomplete and one needed to kind of kick things along a bit to get it all to work but I did succeed. It is, however, not up gradable and many things dealing with peripherals just don't quite work right no matter what one does. I did try the ubuntu live CD with orca and it did find the sound card because you can hear the bongo drums but the 256 megs of RAM are not sufficient to make it all go when booting from the live CD so I am hoping that a thinner live CD will be the answer. In my job, I sometimes need to connect a RS-232 port to a device that is either partly dead or off-line due to network issues. A RS-232 dongle connected to the oralux laptop caused that spelling contingency bug to rear its ugly head although one could sure receive the data but it is only slightly more fun than water boarding. A PCMCIA serial port didn't seem to be recognized by kermit so I am hoping that at least some of these problems will go away if the new ISO will work. Do any of these issues sound familiar to others on the list? Stay tuned for more thrills and spills. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group
