Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement

Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement

[Nick G]

Good evening, all.
    For those who are knew, early in 2005, I installed myself as the Zipspeak maintainer, then still having access to a windows 98 PC at school.  Zipspeak, a linux distribution you could unzip and run on a machine with Windows 98, was a that time languishing, maintainerless.  My hope, at that time, was to keep Zipspeak a viable option for those who need it.  However, I lost access to that PC, which didn't work for testing zipspeak anyway, and any and all others who could've tested for me can no longer do so.  It is no longer viable for me to release Zipspeaks into the wild, or even to support them, seeing as I don't use them.  Zipspeak's functions have been superceded by other distributions, such as GRML, Ubuntu, etc.  Effective immediately, I no longer willl support or maintain Zipspeak.
Thank you for your understanding,
Nick

Re: Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement

[Tony Baechler]

Nick G wrote:
>     For those who are knew, early in 2005, I installed myself as the Zipspeak maintainer, then still having access to a windows 98 PC at school.  Zipspeak, a linux distribution you could unzip and run on a machine with Windows 98, was a that time languishing, maintainerless.  My hope, at that time, was to keep Zipspeak a viable option for those who need it.  However, I lost access to that PC, which didn't work for testing zipspeak anyway, and any and all others who could've tested for me can no longer do so.  It is no longer viable for me to release Zipspeaks into the wild, or even to support them, seeing as I don't use them.  Zipspeak's functions have been superceded by other distributions, such as GRML, Ubuntu, etc.  Effective immediately, I no longer willl support or maintain Zipspeak.
>   


Hi all,

While I agree with Nick that a live CD is generally much better for new 
Linux users, I understand that not all computers can boot live CDs and 
some may not even have CD drives.  Therefore, if there is enough demand, 
I would take over maintenance.  I still run Win98 here as my primary OS 
although I'm gradually switching to Linux and XP.  The loadlin boot 
loader for DOS is still supported in the latest Debian unstable and the 
"win32-loader" package is designed to install Debian via a Win32 
installer.  I haven't used said installer so I know nothing about it.  
My point is that if I get enough requests for it, I'll continue to work 
on making Zipspeak releases provided there is not a lot of work involved 
in getting the kernel to compile.  I strongly recommend against the 
umsdos file system and in 99% of cases I would say just to use a live CD 
or a multiboot setup, but not all computers can do that.  I'll close 
with a question.  Does anyone even use Zipspeak nowadays?

Re: Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement

[Gaijin]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 02:57:31AM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
>Does anyone even use Zipspeak nowadays?

	Haven't even tried it, myself.  Sorry.  I used Slackware-11 to
get started, and ported to Debian Etch as soon as I heard about
Shane's netinst CD for SpeakUP, and due to virus concerns,
absolutely refuse to run Windows and Linux on the same machine.
Not unless each is on a removable hard drive, anyway.  I now use
a laptop for Windows-XP and eventually plan to use samba for
file sharing.  As I rarely boot the laptop, I'm in no hurry.

			Michael

Re: Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement

[Adam Myrow]

I doubt that Zipspeak can be maintained anymore.  It relied on UMSdDOS to 
run a Linux OS within a FAT partition, and UMSDOS was dropped in the 2.6 
kernel.  The only practical ways to run Linux on the same partition as 
Windows that I know of are either a loop mount, or virtual machine.

Re: Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement

[Glenn Ervin]

I wanted to a while back, but it was not up to date.  I would like to see it 
use software speech, but even if not, it would be good to have.  On one of 
my computers, I can boot to a USB drive, and I have an HP utility that can 
format a USB stick as any of 3 formats, FAT, FAT32, and NTFS.
So I could format the stick FAT32 and run ZipSpeak on it.
Glenn
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Baechler" <tony@baechler.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 4:57 AM
Subject: Re: Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement


Nick G wrote:
>     For those who are knew, early in 2005, I installed myself as the 
> Zipspeak maintainer, then still having access to a windows 98 PC at 
> school.  Zipspeak, a linux distribution you could unzip and run on a 
> machine with Windows 98, was a that time languishing, maintainerless.  My 
> hope, at that time, was to keep Zipspeak a viable option for those who 
> need it.  However, I lost access to that PC, which didn't work for testing 
> zipspeak anyway, and any and all others who could've tested for me can no 
> longer do so.  It is no longer viable for me to release Zipspeaks into the 
> wild, or even to support them, seeing as I don't use them.  Zipspeak's 
> functions have been superceded by other distributions, such as GRML, 
> Ubuntu, etc.  Effective immediately, I no longer willl support or maintain 
> Zipspeak.
>


Hi all,

While I agree with Nick that a live CD is generally much better for new
Linux users, I understand that not all computers can boot live CDs and
some may not even have CD drives.  Therefore, if there is enough demand,
I would take over maintenance.  I still run Win98 here as my primary OS
although I'm gradually switching to Linux and XP.  The loadlin boot
loader for DOS is still supported in the latest Debian unstable and the
"win32-loader" package is designed to install Debian via a Win32
installer.  I haven't used said installer so I know nothing about it.
My point is that if I get enough requests for it, I'll continue to work
on making Zipspeak releases provided there is not a lot of work involved
in getting the kernel to compile.  I strongly recommend against the
umsdos file system and in 99% of cases I would say just to use a live CD
or a multiboot setup, but not all computers can do that.  I'll close
with a question.  Does anyone even use Zipspeak nowadays?
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