debian on a laptop?

debian on a laptop?

[Karen Lewellen]

Granted I have the desktop hardware sitting in my office for a Linux box, 
but am told no one in Toronto can do this sort of work from an access 
standpoint.
Debian does have some programs I would like to use, like lilly-pond, and I 
understand ebrowse can work with it, we are still working on this at 
shellworld.
My two questions are basic hardware specifications if I go with laptop 
instead, and what about speech?
I prefer tectalk speech if I can get it, which I guess? meaning I could be 
wrong, means an external synthesizer?
thanks in advance,
Karen

Re: debian on a laptop?

[Trevor Saunders]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1293 bytes --]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:25:38PM -0500, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> Granted I have the desktop hardware sitting in my office for a Linux
> box, but am told no one in Toronto can do this sort of work from an
> access standpoint.

 hmm? I'm not sure what you mean, what work is this?  I ee you are
 writing from a shellworld email so my first gues would be some sort of
 syadminy thing, which I would think you could do just fine from a
 linux, imho more comfortably than from a windows one.

> My two questions are basic hardware specifications if I go with
> laptop instead, and what about speech?

for what hardware it mostly depends on what you plan to do with the
machine, but I'd also keep in mind what hardware is likely to take work
to get working.

> I prefer tectalk speech if I can get it, which I guess? meaning I
> could be wrong, means an external synthesizer?

I've never heard of techtalk to you mean the ibmtts / ttsynth eliquence
like thing?  Personally I've always been perfectly fine with espeak, but
I understand plenty of others feel differently.

Trev

> thanks in advance,
> Karen
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list@redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 836 bytes --]

Re: debian on a laptop?

[Karen Lewellen]

Hi there,
will try to speak to your points.
>From my experience reading and the like, actually Janina told me this ages 
back, it is a good idea to have someone at your end who is at least 
vaguely familiar with Linux if devoting an entire machine to this for the 
first time.
Just reading SOME of the commands one must type makes me dizzy sometimes 
lol.
I run both a production and a nonprofit, am a radio journalist and 
professional singer.  I do not mind tinkering in DOS, because I learned it 
well when I had more time for learning.
I have far far less time  to completely construct this system myself from 
the ground up without  someone used to and familiar with the speech 
aspects, and the compiling requirements  of Linux nearby to call.
Given my druthers I would duplicate my first learning experience, get 
trained in the screen reader   the basics of the operating system and a 
couple of my major programs,  and learn where to look or read for help.
I would happily pay for this, in town if I could find it.

I am not lazy, just honest. I would rather concentrate on learning how to 
run what I must run, once constructed to make running easy if that makes 
sense, read documentation with a framework of understanding  that moves 
me 
forward.  I know what my talents are, and what they are not, or more how I 
can use my time these days  grin.
I think too I would rather learn first hand with someone, if I must do the 
constructing, but would rather not have to do much construction, 
certainly not alone.
My computers are critical tools in my trade, I want my Linux machine to be 
what my other machines already are.  ones I can count on as functional with 
a minimum  amount of bugs, constant  upgrading and issues.  I want to 
enhance how I make my living and that means setup so I can count on it, and 
debian seems to put out solid packages.
Think out of, ormostlyout of the box.
As for my goals,  two, perhaps three.  I have in a sealed box the edition 
of wordperfect created for Linux / UNIX.   unless I am sure this can be 
run, I am not going to do word processing, leaving only two.
I have never been a windows user, so am not working from that frame of 
reference at all. solid command line is my life as I use DOS every single 
day, several hours a day.
I seek slightly more Internet flexibility than I am getting now in terms 
of browsers.  if that means ebrowse then terrific, or firefox if it works 
in debian.  Ray keeps speaking of ice Wiesel, but I have not heard 
enough to know if this is the best alternative option.  if I can I want to 
access youtube materials, audio in particular,  or youtube like material 
as well thas I am 
starting to need this more  and more for work.  Lillypond is a 
composing package, so I would want to run this properly as well.
I would add and include in my Internet concept getting and downloading 
books,  both nls to my player, not on the computer, and or library e-book 
/ audio book content and burning that content to a cd  for playing n say a 
victor reader classic, or a standard cd  player.
as for my desire for dectalk, I appreciate that others have different 
experiences.  Still I have used dectalk for computing and stand alone 
reading, I have a reading edge, for more than 15 years.  my goal is to add 
this computer to my professional tools, fill in the gaps that I cannot 
already do elsewhere and  with as little   down time as 
possible.
Actually my favorite voice still likely remains the old vert ones, but oh 
well.
getting to working is what I want to minimize, meaning I want to choose 
in advance hardware in a fashion that  will work.  I would like to be able 
to travel with this machine, use the Internet either via dsl or dial up if the only 
option, on the road, as well as plug it into my rooter here at home when 
I need it.
since I can do dsl  in DOS, and friends come over with their windows 
laptops and go on the Internet at my house, I feel sure it should be 
achievable in Linux too.
Is this more clear?
Karen

On Fri, 14 Jan 2011, Trevor Saunders wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:25:38PM -0500, Karen Lewellen wrote:
>> Granted I have the desktop hardware sitting in my office for a Linux
>> box, but am told no one in Toronto can do this sort of work from an
>> access standpoint.
>
> hmm? I'm not sure what you mean, what work is this?  I ee you are
> writing from a shellworld email so my first gues would be some sort of
> syadminy thing, which I would think you could do just fine from a
> linux, imho more comfortably than from a windows one.
>
>> My two questions are basic hardware specifications if I go with
>> laptop instead, and what about speech?
>
> for what hardware it mostly depends on what you plan to do with the
> machine, but I'd also keep in mind what hardware is likely to take work
> to get working.
>
>> I prefer tectalk speech if I can get it, which I guess? meaning I
>> could be wrong, means an external synthesizer?
>
> I've never heard of techtalk to you mean the ibmtts / ttsynth eliquence
> like thing?  Personally I've always been perfectly fine with espeak, but
> I understand plenty of others feel differently.
>
> Trev
>
>> thanks in advance,
>> Karen
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blinux-list mailing list
>> Blinux-list@redhat.com
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

Re: debian on a laptop?

[marbux]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 12:19 AM, Karen Lewellen
<klewellen@shellworld.net> wrote:
> As for my goals,  two, perhaps three.  I have in a sealed box the edition of
> wordperfect created for Linux / UNIX.   unless I am sure this can be run, I
> am not going to do word processing, leaving only two.

What version of WordPerfect? If it's 8 or 8.1 (or earlier), it should
work although you may need to run an older version of the Linux kernel
for it. If it's WordPerfect Office 2000, it's an initial port of WP
Office for Windows to WINE and is full of show-stopper bugs; no
updates were ever issued. Despite considerable involvement in the
WordPerfect user community, I know of no one who thinks of it as
usable.

> browsers.  if that means ebrowse then terrific, or firefox if it works in
> debian.  Ray keeps speaking of ice Wiesel, but I have not heard enough to
> know if this is the best alternative option.

Ice Weasel *is* Firefox with the Firefox branding removed because of
trademark claims by the Mozilla Foundation making the branded version
incompatible with GPL licensing and ineligible for inclusion in Linux
distributions whose developers who refuse to ship software that is
incompatible with the GPL. Negotiations continue to resolve the
trademark issue and if successful will likely result in Ice Weasel
becoming a thing of the past.

Personally, I almost never use Firefox anymore, only when I need a
particular Firefox extension. Google Chrome is a much superior
browser, in no small part because each open web page is launched in a
separate process. The practical result is that if a given page has
problems or is very slow in loading, you can continue to use the
browser for other pages, without having to kill the browser's process
to recover.

Chrome is based on the WebKit page rendering engine, which is also way
better than the Mozilla Gecko engine used in Firefox. WebKit is an
emerging de facto standard for web browsers and client-side apps that
run in a browser. WebKit began its life as the KHTML page rendering
engine used by KDE apps. It was picked up and improved by Apple for
its Safari browser, then by Google and now again by KDE. Opera is also
migrating to WebKit.

If you have objections to proprietary software, you might check out
Chromium, the open source browser project's code that Google Chrome is
based on. <http://www.chromium.org/Home>. But there are far fewer
extensions available for it.

Best regards,

Paul

Re: debian on a laptop?

[RiverWind]

Greetings and Salutations

Just a few notes, I have been working with Ice-Weasel for a few
months now, and have amassed a bit of know-how where usage of that
browser is concerned. Incidently, Ice Weasel is not much more than
Mozilla's Linux version of Fire-Fox which they developed for
Windows. Ice-Weasel increases the scope of your browsing
capability, especially where Java Script is concerned.

I have had quite an experience with the processing and/or use of
NLS books, but I have reached the point where I believe myself to
be at the point where I am qualified to write a brief manual on the
subject. Also the use of portable peripherals such as flash-drives
is another thing with which I have perforce become proficient. I
would be happy to share all of my experience and hard-won knowledge
on these topics if doing so would prevent others from experiencing
the headaches that I myself experienced. Hells-bells, had it not
been for this group, blind-l and BardTalk, I would be in quite a
fix out of which there would be no appreciable egress.

Internet browsing, reading NLS books and using flash-drives and the
like, pose different challenges for linux users than they do for
those who use Windows as their primary operating system. This tends
to put a bit of a kink in the learning curve. However, the extra
challenges aren't at all insurmountable.

Most Cordially Indeed,
Riverwind

Feel free to visit my website and my blog and learn more about me
and what I stand for.
My Website @ http://riverwind.shellworld.net
My Blog http://windraven13.livejournal.com/\x1a

Re: debian on a laptop?

[Geoff Shang]

On Fri, 14 Jan 2011, Karen Lewellen wrote:

>> From my experience reading and the like, actually Janina told me this ages 
> back, it is a good idea to have someone at your end who is at least vaguely 
> familiar with Linux if devoting an entire machine to this for the first time.

This is not so much the case as it used to be, particularly if it's not 
your only machine and you can use other means to get assistance from the 
net.

> Just reading SOME of the commands one must type makes me dizzy sometimes lol.
> I run both a production and a nonprofit, am a radio journalist and 
> professional singer.  I do not mind tinkering in DOS, because I learned it 
> well when I had more time for learning.
> I have far far less time  to completely construct this system myself from the 
> ground up without  someone used to and familiar with the speech aspects, and 
> the compiling requirements  of Linux nearby to call.

There is less and less need to compile anything these days, unless you 
have very special requirements.  Certainly I have not done a kernel 
compilation in literally years.

> I am not lazy, just honest. I would rather concentrate on learning how to run 
> what I must run, once constructed to make running easy if that makes sense, 
> read documentation with a framework of understanding  that moves me forward. 
> I know what my talents are, and what they are not, or more how I can use my 
> time these days  grin.

I know where you're coming from.  I don't have the luxury of being able to 
mess with things that I used to have.  Fortunately, speech and Braille 
solutions are now part of mainstream distributions, and therefore 
integrate much more nicely into the "easy" way of doing things.

I've only ever used Debian, and others may well evangelise their own 
distributions, but I certainly find it to be good.  Even using the most 
recent stable release from 2 years ago, I was able to install it from 
scratch using Speakup and an external speech synthesiser.  The next 
version of Debian is due to be released shortly.

As for Dectalk, I'm not a big expert on this synth but you're likely to 
need to use hardware for this, and I don't know if it will work with Orca.

Geoff.