Hello all. I wanted to let folks know that beta install iso images are available for devuan Chimaera, which is based on the up coming debian release after buster. We have a major change to announce in the release of Chimaera. I know that others besides myself remove pulseaudio as one of the first tasks that we do upon installing a debian or devuan system. Also, when installing a graphical desktop in debian, and in past releases of devuan, there is the problem that both the graphical desktop, and speakup aren't accessible with software speech at the same time in the installed system, because pulseaudio and speakup both fight for control of the audio hardware. Thanks to Mark, one of the devuan developers who did the heavy lifting on this issue, we now have the ability to install devuan Chimaera without pulseaudio in the installed system. This means that both speakup and a graphical desktop are ready to go upon booting into the installed system post install. I have verified that firefox still plays audio without pulseaudio installed, and that speakup can be used while firefox is playing audio in the graphical desktop. The option which controls whether or not to install pulseaudio is item 10 in the list of software to install, called Speech accessibility configuration. This option is chosen by default along with the mate desktop, which seems to be the most accessible graphical desktop. Those who want to return to the way things were in previous releases, and the way things seem to be in the up coming debian release can simply choose to not install Speech accessibility configuration. Alternatively, installing pulseaudio in the installed system will also revert the changes that Speech accessibility configuration makes by purging the devuan-speech-dispatcher-config-override and task-speech-accessibility packages. For those who are not installing one of the graphical desktops the Speech accessibility configuration option should also not be chosen, since it isn't necessary in a text console only system, and since choosing that option will also pull in packages which aren't necessary in a text only system. The devuan installer is started with speech synthesis the same way the debian installer is started with that option, by pressing s, or s followed by enter after booting. Using a serial speech synthesizer and brlTTY are items I haven't gotten around to testing yet, but they should also work as far as I know. For those who want to give things a try, you can grab Chimaera netinst iso images from: <https://sledjhamr.org/devuan-cd/devuan_chimaera/installer-iso/> or: <http://files.devuan.org/devuan_chimaera/installer-iso/> I won't give direct links, since the netinst images are updated at least once a week. If someone finds problems, please report back, and Mark with myself will see what can be done. Thanks for reading. Greg -- web site: http://www.gregn.net gpg public key: http://www.gregn.net/pubkey.asc skype: gregn1 (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first) If we haven't been in touch before, e-mail me before adding me to your contacts. -- Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@xxxxxx
