PCI serial?

PCI serial?

[Zachary Kline]

Hiya,
    I've finally decided to quit monkeying around in virtual machines and go out and look for a PCI serial I/O card with ports.  I want to know beforehand if this will work with speakup, if so anything special I should do with it, etc...Has anybody had any experience with these before?
Thanks,
Zack.

Re: PCI serial?

[Luke Yelavich]

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On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 04:24:08PM EST, Zachary Kline wrote:
> Hiya,

> I've finally decided to quit monkeying around in virtual machines 
> and go out and look for a PCI serial I/O card with ports.  I want 
> to know beforehand if this will work with speakup,

PCI serial cards do not work, unless they use the standard IO range and 
IRQs for serial ports, which will be highly unlikely.
- -- 
Luke Yelavich
GPG key: 0xD06320CE 
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Email & MSN: themuso@themuso.com
Jabber: themuso@jabber.org.au
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Re: PCI serial?

[Zachary Kline]

Hello,
    Is it possible to configure the board to do this sort of thing?  I'm no 
hardware expert, at all, and it just seems as if I'm at a serious 
disadvantage here.  I can't install Linux without using Speakup, and I can't 
use Speakup without a serial port, and I can't, well, you get the idea.  I 
know there are probably many technical reasons for this situation.  However, 
i'm just honestly at a loss for what to try.  Actually, my computer doesn't 
even seem to boot live CDs correctly.  But there is another problem, eh?
Thanks for your help, guys.
All the best,
Zack.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Luke Yelavich" <themuso@themuso.com>
To: <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 11:42 PM
Subject: Re: PCI serial?


> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 04:24:08PM EST, Zachary Kline wrote:
>> Hiya,
>
>> I've finally decided to quit monkeying around in virtual machines
>> and go out and look for a PCI serial I/O card with ports.  I want
>> to know beforehand if this will work with speakup,
>
> PCI serial cards do not work, unless they use the standard IO range and
> IRQs for serial ports, which will be highly unlikely.
> - -- 
> Luke Yelavich
> GPG key: 0xD06320CE
> (http://www.themuso.com/themuso-gpg-key.txt)
> Email & MSN: themuso@themuso.com
> Jabber: themuso@jabber.org.au
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
>
> iD8DBQFGquVNjVefwtBjIM4RAs8WAKCRVXJMo5/D1CKJXZqRpUHPiSB8eQCeLFO5
> Zlp2QXDOmRcEvlETtBzW/B0=
> =+t3R
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

Re: PCI serial?

[Luke Yelavich]

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On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 04:58:15PM EST, Zachary Kline wrote:
> Hello,
>     Is it possible to configure the board to do this sort of thing?  I'm no 
> hardware expert, at all, and it just seems as if I'm at a serious 
> disadvantage here.

PCI is designed to be automatically configured to any available resource 
on the machine. No PCI card has any jumpers etc to configure particular 
resources. The best you can hope for is for your BIOS to force the 
assignment of a particular IRQ to the slot your serial card is in. 
However, that doesn't solve the I/O port allocation, and it doesn't work 
with systems that use APIC.
- -- 
Luke Yelavich
GPG key: 0xD06320CE 
	 (http://www.themuso.com/themuso-gpg-key.txt)
Email & MSN: themuso@themuso.com
Jabber: themuso@jabber.org.au
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Re: PCI serial?

[John covici]

As far as I know, speakup will not work with one of these  cards --
sometimes motherboards have a serial port which is not brought out to
the back -- maybe you could check and see.  Most boards except very
new ones had one serial port, but sometimes it is just a header. 


on Saturday 07/28/2007 Luke Yelavich(themuso@themuso.com) wrote
 > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
 > Hash: SHA1
 > 
 > On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 04:58:15PM EST, Zachary Kline wrote:
 > > Hello,
 > >     Is it possible to configure the board to do this sort of thing?  I'm no 
 > > hardware expert, at all, and it just seems as if I'm at a serious 
 > > disadvantage here.
 > 
 > PCI is designed to be automatically configured to any available resource 
 > on the machine. No PCI card has any jumpers etc to configure particular 
 > resources. The best you can hope for is for your BIOS to force the 
 > assignment of a particular IRQ to the slot your serial card is in. 
 > However, that doesn't solve the I/O port allocation, and it doesn't work 
 > with systems that use APIC.
 > - -- 
 > Luke Yelavich
 > GPG key: 0xD06320CE 
 > 	 (http://www.themuso.com/themuso-gpg-key.txt)
 > Email & MSN: themuso@themuso.com
 > Jabber: themuso@jabber.org.au
 > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
 > Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
 > 
 > iD8DBQFGquwijVefwtBjIM4RAkmSAKDwGb7lwMrr7+RjgbYOmc9J4QScXQCfYrs4
 > lfibsRpAOoCdGOMueU4lmps=
 > =0CB/
 > -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
 > 
 > _______________________________________________
 > Speakup mailing list
 > Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
 > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici@ccs.covici.com

Re: PCI serial?

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 11:58:15PM -0700, Zachary Kline wrote:
> Hello,
>     Is it possible to configure the board to do this sort of thing?  I'm no 
> hardware expert, at all, and it just seems as if I'm at a serious 
> disadvantage here.  I can't install Linux without using Speakup, and I can't 
> use Speakup without a serial port, and I can't, well, you get the
idea.

Honestly, it's not as bad as you make it out to be. If you were
playing around in a vm thus far, and if you're ok with how the vm
does, my advice would be to just stick with the vm. Provided you have
a fairly modern system, which you seem to, there's really not much
difference between running in a vm, and on a physical box. Arguably,
running in a vm has the advantage that you have a specific set of
emulated hardware. Provided that hardware works ok for you with linux,
if you don't run on a physical box, you don't have to worry about
trying to get actual hardware to work, especially if you didn't build
or design the system yourself with the intent of running gnu/linux on
it.

Greg


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Re: PCI serial?

[Zachary Kline]

Hiya,
    I can understand this philosophy, to be sure.  The VM does work quite 
well for me.  I'm even able to emulate serial ports with a fair degree of 
usability.  I'm not too sure about the performance hit of using a VM vs 
using a physical machine, but it doesn't seem that bad.  New kernels compile 
fine, anyways.
Thanks for your help, everybody.
All the best,
Zack.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg@romuald.net.eu.org>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2007 10:24 AM
Subject: Re: PCI serial?


> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 11:58:15PM -0700, Zachary Kline wrote:
>> Hello,
>>     Is it possible to configure the board to do this sort of thing?  I'm 
>> no
>> hardware expert, at all, and it just seems as if I'm at a serious
>> disadvantage here.  I can't install Linux without using Speakup, and I 
>> can't
>> use Speakup without a serial port, and I can't, well, you get the
> idea.
>
> Honestly, it's not as bad as you make it out to be. If you were
> playing around in a vm thus far, and if you're ok with how the vm
> does, my advice would be to just stick with the vm. Provided you have
> a fairly modern system, which you seem to, there's really not much
> difference between running in a vm, and on a physical box. Arguably,
> running in a vm has the advantage that you have a specific set of
> emulated hardware. Provided that hardware works ok for you with linux,
> if you don't run on a physical box, you don't have to worry about
> trying to get actual hardware to work, especially if you didn't build
> or design the system yourself with the intent of running gnu/linux on
> it.
>
> Greg
>
>
> - -- 
> web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org
> gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc
> skype: gregn1
> (authorization required, add me to your contacts list first)
>
> - --
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> mNDaijWPHPUfEpkJ6Ot1w8U=
> =uZpi
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

Re: PCI serial?

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 11:38:40AM -0700, Zachary Kline wrote:
> I'm not too sure about the performance hit of using a VM vs 
> using a physical machine, but it doesn't seem that bad.  New kernels compile 
> fine, anyways.

Well, I can only speak from my own experience here obviously. This
will of course depend on your hardware, as well as the vm software you
use. I stand to be corrected here, but I think the main key here is
how many instructions get executed by the physical cpu vs how many get
emulated by the vm/how much code recompiling the vm needs to do on the
fly to execute the modified code on the physical cpu.

For example, I'm running virtualbox, and virtualpc on a 1.1GHz
celeron, with 512Mb of physical ram. I've run both gnu/linux as a
guest, as well as winxp temporarily for testing purposes. From my
perspective, both run about the same under virtualbox, as they do on
the host. In fact, the only way I can remember I'm in the guest, and
not actually on the host, is that there is a very slight delay between
pressing a key on the keyboard, and the action resulting in the key
press. This delay of course doesn't exist on the physical machine, and
is barely noticeable on the guest as it is. It's certainly not long
enough to be annoying, although I guess it may be annoying just a bit
if you're typing fast with key echo, and are sensitive to how fast you
hear the character you just typed. My guess is that if I had something
more modern, say a 2GHz dual-core system, this delay might not even
exist, or at least not be noticeable.

I also do find that when using gnu/linux as the guest, and
espeak/speechd-up/speech-dispatcher for software speech, if I'm
typing, or reading character by character, there is a slight barely
perceptible echo of the last half-a-second of text spoken at the
end. Since this doesn't however happen when running window-eyes under
winxp as the guest, I think this may be due to how
alsa/espeak/something else deals with the emulated sound hardware.

On the other hand, when running virtualpc under the same physical
hardware, the performance of the vm is noticeably slower, in my humble
opinion, even if the
guest additions are installed in a windows guest. My biggest issue
overall running a vm on this system is the amount of ram I'm able to
allocate to the guest, though this wouldn't be a problem most likely on
a more modern system. Hth.

Greg


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Re: PCI serial?

[Zachary Kline]

Hi Greg,
    I am curious how you use Virtual Box with Window-Eyes or anything?  It 
doesn't seem overly accessible?
Thanks,
Zack.

virtualbox, was: Re: PCI serial?

[Gregory Nowak]

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You're right, the gui interface is written in qt3, and it sucks in terms of
access, to say the least. I've already written about this on the
vbox-users list, and from the resulting comments I got from someone at
innotek, I plan to write to gw-micro support about it, to let them know
that innotek and virtualbox exists, and vise versa, and see if they're
willing to work together to do something about that. If you're using
window-eyes, you can reclass the custom control in the virtualbox gui
interface as a multidocument window. You still won't get the kind of
access you should by any means, but if you're patient, listen
carefully to what wineyes says, and use the wineyes mouse hotkeys, you
can do the important stuff in the gui, such as creating and starting a
vm. If you're using another screen reader, then you're on your own
there.

The good news is that whatever you can do in the gui, you can also do
in the vboxmanage command-line interface, which is not hard to use,
once you understand how to specify all the options to do what you want
to do, In fact, vboxmanage is the generic interface to interacting
with virtualbox, and there are things that you can't do in the gui,
that you do need to use vboxmanage for. Also, I think the virtualbox
manual is well-written, and there is also an entire chapter, devoted
to describing the usage of vboxmanage in detail. Hth.

Greg



On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 12:37:11PM -0700, Zachary Kline wrote:
> Hi Greg,
>     I am curious how you use Virtual Box with Window-Eyes or anything?  It 
> doesn't seem overly accessible?
> Thanks,
> Zack.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

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Re: PCI serial?

[Janina Sajka]

Yes, I've done this. No problems.

Janina

Zachary Kline writes:
> Hiya,
>     I've finally decided to quit monkeying around in virtual machines and go out and look for a PCI serial I/O card with ports.  I want to know beforehand if this will work with speakup, if so anything special I should do with it, etc...Has anybody had any experience with these before?
> Thanks,
> Zack.

Re: PCI serial?

[Janina Sajka]

Argh! I responded to the wrong message. Very sorry. Please ignore this.

Janina Sajka writes:
> Yes, I've done this. No problems.
> 
> Janina
> 
> Zachary Kline writes:
> > Hiya,
> >     I've finally decided to quit monkeying around in virtual machines and go out and look for a PCI serial I/O card with ports.  I want to know beforehand if this will work with speakup, if so anything special I should do with it, etc...Has anybody had any experience with these before?
> > Thanks,
> > Zack.

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