Hello and happy New Year. Over the New Year's weekend, I downloaded and installed the middle-sized version of vinux which is a version of Debian Linux which boots up speaking and uses speakup as the speech engine. This is a game changer for me and I think it should be one for a number of others who own middle-aged to slightly older computers that are not ready for the attic or the recyclers yet, but are not bleeding-edge dream machines with gigs of RAM and terrabytes of disk storage. You can read about vinux at http://vinux-development.blogspot.com/ There is a minimal iso image, a mid-sized one and a set of 4, I think, CDROM images for a complete Linux installation from CD. I tried the vinux installation on 3 systems. One is a Gateway system from 1995 or so. It only presently has 64 megs of RAM and that is really not enough. The speech works, but aptitude barfs every time you try to install anything and complains about running out of memory. Also, there were numerous errors during the installation stating that there was no space left on the device. I believe that is probably the virtual disk created from available RAM of which there is far too little. Amazingly, the speech is fine. The remedy is to find some more memory and try the installation again as I don't know what all didn't get installed. The second system was that laptop. It has finally met its match. The installation went smoothly and it now has 6 virtual consoles that talk when you need them. Just for fun, I tried to add mplayer and mpg123. They went right in and speechdispatcher and the other alsa services all seem to play nicely together. You hear speakup mixed right in with the music or whatever audio one is listening to and neither seems to disrupt the other. I also tried recording with a microphone. I still may not have amixer set right but the recordings are much better and consistent each time. That laptop has no line input although amixer reports a Line input. This system appears to be working although I haven't tried a PCMCIA serial port yet. The third system is another oldie from around 2000 at work. I had a terrible time formatting the hard drive for Linux because it had had FreeBSD on it and I didn't know you can't just format the drive with ext3 file systems. You start with a ext2 and use makee2fs -j /PARTITIONNAME and things are much better afterward. Now for the slightly bad news. When you install vinux, you get a British keyboard. I am sure there are plenty of British people who feel the same way when they get a US keyboard. The British and US keyboards are mostly identical but the differences can drive one crazy when you are used to one and now confronted with the other. The shift of the number 2 gives you a double quotation mark. The key that should send the \ gives you a number or Pounds sign as in shift-3. The Caps-lock key does not announce as it toggles and you soon discover that setting it involves the normal speakup sequence of shift-capslock but clearing it requires just a tap on the Caps-lock. Also, the Caps-lock on the UK keyboard shifts numbers and punctuation marks as if one was really holding down the Shift key. That's bad when you have punctuations in a password. If any of you install vinux, you can temporarily get a US keyboard by entering the following command after su'ing to root: loadkeys us Not only do you magically get an American keyboard map, but the Caps-lock starts announcing its status each time you change it and it also works the way we are used to seeing it work. When you get vinux installed, the way to permanently change to a US keyboard is complicated slightly by the fact that the instructions do not work quite right. You are supposed to type install-keymap us and a new boot-time keyboard map should be copied to /etc/console-setup/boottime.kmap.gz or something close but it doesn't happen. I discovered after some poking around that it installs the keymap in to /etc/console for some reason. To fix that, you must manually copy that file to /etc/console-setup/ and then it all works. I got in touch with the fellow who wrote the vinux distribution and told him how much I appreciate the effort he has made. As far as I am concerned, it has made a lot of equipment that was gathering dust useful again. I can now turn off a setup I have been using for 23 years which includes an Echo P.C. synthesizer. It has worked well for all these years, but it is time to modernize. Sorry for the length of this message, but I think vinux adds more options to making Unix/Linux more accessible and that is what it is all about. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group
