Jeez, what hassle.

Jeez, what hassle.

[Gaijin]

     Well, I get half-way through the Slackware install and then try to 
install to the root partition and that's as far as I can go. <sighs>  Is 
there a way to install slackware that bypasses all the stupid menus?  Or 
is there a way how I can better identify what is selected?  I know about 
the "cursoring up is better" part, as what you're on is said first, 
followed by what you've left.  Tried turning cursor tracking on and off, 
too.  The docs say just to type in the kernal's name: speakup.s  Maybe 
opening another terminal and finding...damn I hate menus.  Give me an 
alias, any day. <laughs>  Oh well.  Just ranting

         Michael

Re: Jeez, what hassle.

[Doug Sutherland]

Michael,

> Well, I get half-way through the Slackware install and then try to 
> install to the root partition and that's as far as I can go. <sighs>

Are you talking about installing lilo, where it gives you the option
of installing it to either the master boot record (MBR) or the 
superblock of the root partition?

I always use the MBR not the superblock, but if you are 
talking about lilo install failing, you actually have not lost your
whole install, just the bootloader install. Sometimes the lilo 
install will fail, and if so you keep going to the end of the 
slackware install, then you can do what I've been saying 
about booting any drive that won't boot:

Boot from floppy or CD-ROM with the generic kernel,
I think even a disk with the speakup kernel will work, 
but you need to do this at the boot prompt:

boot: 
bare.i root=/dev/hda1 noinitrd ro

That would be using the slackware bare.i kernel, 
but I think you could do the same with speakup 
kernel like this:

boot:
speakup.s speakup_synth=ltlk root=/dev/hda1 noinitrd ro

You're loading the kernel from removable media but 
booting to the root filesystem on hard drive. Even if 
lilo failed to install, once you have booted the new system
this way, check the lilo.conf to make sure it look correct
then just run lilo to install the bootloader

lilo -v

>  Is there a way to install slackware that bypasses all the 
> stupid menus? 

No because it launches all of the various scripts that 
create all the directories and unpack all the tar files,
create config files etc.


> The docs say just to type in the kernal's name: speakup.s

speakup.s

This is like the bare.i (standard IDE) disk, but has support for Speakup 
(and since there was space, support for Adaptec's AIC7xxx SCSI 
controllers is also included) Speakup provides access to Linux for the 
visually impaired community. It does this by sending console output to 
a number of different hardware speech synthesizers. It provides access 
to Linux by making screen review functions available. For more 
information about speakup and its drivers check out: 
http://www.linux-speakup.org. To use this, you'll need to specify one 
of the supported synthesizers on the bootdisk's boot prompt:

ramdisk speakup_synth=synth

where 'synth' is one of the supported speech synthesizers: acntpc, 
acntsa, apolo, audptr, bns, decext, dectlk, dtlk, ltlk, spkout, txprt

This is from here:
http://www.slackware.com/install/bootdisk.php

Re: Jeez, what hassle.

[C.M. Brannon]

Gaijin <gaijin@clearwire.net> writes:

>      Well, I get half-way through the Slackware install and then try to 
> install to the root partition and that's as far as I can go. <sighs>  Is 
> there a way to install slackware that bypasses all the stupid menus?  Or 

Several years ago, there were several versions of the Slackware
installer.  One of them lacked all of the menus, and it played very
nicely with speakup.  I believe the name of the program was
setup.tty.  Unfortunately, it seems to have disappeared.

The menu problem is caused by a little utility named "dialog", that
allows one to display dialogs within shell scripts.
I think it should be possible to hack dialog so that it displays menus
with numbered options, rather than cursor-selectable options.  Such
menus work well with screenreaders.  
Perhaps the dialog tool could number its options if an environment
variable were set.
Has anyone on the list given much thought to this problem?

-- Chris

Re: Jeez, what hassle.

[Gaijin]

C.M. Brannon wrote:
> Several years ago, there were several versions of the Slackware
> installer.  One of them lacked all of the menus, and it played very
> nicely with speakup.

     Following the directions helps too.  In a few areas I used the 
screen attributes function to read the screen colors.  Setting the 
timezone wasn't easy, and I'm probably set to some timezone in Uganda. 
<shrugs>  I'm surprized tzconfig isn't in Slackware, or if it is, it's 
not in the path.  It worked in Debian. <whines>  I'm starting to sound 
like a Windows user with a win-modem.  I'd better shut up.  Gods, it 
feels good to be back at the prompt.

        Michael

Re: Jeez, what hassle.

[Igor Gueths]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Hi. I remember the last time I installed Slackware, I bypassed all the menus/etc entirely, and did most of it manually. I created all my partitions, formatted them, copied all the packages I 
wanted to the root partition, made sure the rest were mounted, then ran /sbin/installpkg *.tgz (of course copying installpkg from the CD to /sbin on the disk, and chrooting first). I believe I 
let the installer generate a lilo.conf, because I was too lazy at the time to write my own. Granted by itself, this method of installation is a bit convoluted; however, I think it could open 
the way to unattended installing, since it is easily scriptable. You could even extend the script to take some configuration options, and incorporate those into your install as needed.
On Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 07:28:41AM +0100, Gaijin wrote:
> C.M. Brannon wrote:
> > Several years ago, there were several versions of the Slackware
> > installer.  One of them lacked all of the menus, and it played very
> > nicely with speakup.
> 
>      Following the directions helps too.  In a few areas I used the 
> screen attributes function to read the screen colors.  Setting the 
> timezone wasn't easy, and I'm probably set to some timezone in Uganda. 
> <shrugs>  I'm surprized tzconfig isn't in Slackware, or if it is, it's 
> not in the path.  It worked in Debian. <whines>  I'm starting to sound 
> like a Windows user with a win-modem.  I'd better shut up.  Gods, it 
> feels good to be back at the prompt.
> 
>         Michael
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> -- 
> This message has been scanned for viruses and
> dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
> believed to be clean.
> 

- -- 
Igor
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Re: Jeez, what hassle.

[Steve Holmes]

In a recent message, Dialog was brought up and that reminds me about
what I would like to do with it.  What seems to be the biggest problem
for me is the inability to track cursor positioning and to know
precisely which buttons are highlighted befor choosing.  Yes, you can
do that double speak trick to identify the current position in a list
but that is awkward at best and I don't remember right now how well
the highlight option works with dialog.  Besides, I don't think the
version of speakup on Slackware supports that highlight option
either.  What I would like to do with dialog is get into the program
and add logic to set the cursor position each time an item is
highlighted.  I think a similar thing was done to the menuconfig
script for the linux kernel paatched by speakup.  That is, the
menuconfig doesn't position the cursor without the speakup patches
either.  So, I think it is time to update dialog with such a change
and see if that can be included into their production path.  I think
dialog is a cool way to create simple menus with little effort.  I
found a similar deal for perl scripts and it *DOES* do cursor
positioning in its default form; just need to do a little something to
their radio buttons but every thing else works with it.
-- 
HolmesGrown Solutions
The best solutions for the best price!
http://holmesgrown.ld.net/

Re: Jeez, what hassle.

[Alex Snow]

That's odd, I have done quite a few slackware installs over the years 
and never had issues with the menus.  The only issue I've ran into is 
installing on machines with only SCSI disks, who's controlers aren't 
supported by the speakup.s kernel.
On Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 07:28:41AM 
+0100, Gaijin wrote:
> C.M. Brannon wrote:
> > Several years ago, there were several versions of the Slackware
> > installer.  One of them lacked all of the menus, and it played very
> > nicely with speakup.
> 
>      Following the directions helps too.  In a few areas I used the 
> screen attributes function to read the screen colors.  Setting the 
> timezone wasn't easy, and I'm probably set to some timezone in Uganda. 
> <shrugs>  I'm surprized tzconfig isn't in Slackware, or if it is, it's 
> not in the path.  It worked in Debian. <whines>  I'm starting to sound 
> like a Windows user with a win-modem.  I'd better shut up.  Gods, it 
> feels good to be back at the prompt.
> 
>         Michael
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
Eh, that's it, I guess.  No 300 million dollar unveiling event for this
kernel, I'm afraid, but you're still supposed to think of this as the
"happening of the century" (at least until the next kernel comes along).
Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
	-- Linus Torvalds, on releasing 1.3.27

Re: Jeez, what hassle.

[Doug Sutherland]

That Dialog based installer system is dangerous because it's 
so easy to make a mistake, one wrong keystroke and there
is no going back, so if you accidentally press enter on any 
of the sections, you're stuck with whatever was selected in
that section. This one part of slackware that should have 
been fixed using different tools long ago, but I guess patrick
figures its not broken, so don't fix it.

I was thinking, all of the content that goes into those dialog
screens are stored in files, so it should be possible to read
those files and generate an alternate install method. It would
be nice to have a script that makes a file containing all of 
the install choices, similar to the kernel .config, and another
script that does the entire install with one command. Then 
you could also have a default install config, and possibly 
even launch that automatically from a special boot disk.
I may consider working on something like that some day
but I have too many other things I'd like to tackle first.  

  -- Doug