Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Martin McCormick]

	I am going to download the talking CD images mentioned
earlier this year on this list and have another go at a laptop I
have that is really touchy about getting a talking Linux
installation.

	This was my wife's laptop until she got a Mac a couple
of years ago and it did run Windows XP as well as any system
runs Windows. It has 256 megs of RAM and a 1-gig processor so it
is no slouch but it is about 6 years old now.

	As luck would have it, the last edition of oralux which
was out of date 2 years ago came up crowing and what passed for
the HD installation process did install oralux with speakup
although most of the bit about enabling speech turned out to be
incomplete and one needed to kind of kick things along a bit to
get it all to work but I did succeed.

	It is, however, not up gradable and many things dealing
with peripherals just don't quite work right no matter what one
does.

	I did try the ubuntu live CD with orca and it did find
the sound card because you can hear the bongo drums but the 256
megs of RAM are not sufficient to make it all go when booting
from the live CD so I am hoping that a thinner live CD will be
the answer.

	In my job, I sometimes need to connect a RS-232 port to
a device that is either partly dead or off-line due to network
issues. A RS-232 dongle connected to the oralux laptop caused
that spelling contingency bug to rear its ugly head although one
could sure receive the data but it is only slightly more fun
than water boarding. A PCMCIA serial port didn't seem to be
recognized by kermit so  I am hoping that at least some of these
problems will go away if the new ISO will work.

	Do any of these issues sound familiar to others on the
list?

	Stay tuned for more thrills and spills.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group

Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Gene Collins]

Hey Martin.  If none of the Debian stuff works, which I suspect they
will, then try the latest grml cd.  But I have an old dell latitude, on
which the debian istaller cds worked just fine.  You are right though,
you don't have enough ram and cpu power for gnome and orca.

Gene

Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Gregory Nowak]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 11:02:03PM -0500, Gene Collins wrote:
> You are right though,
> you don't have enough ram and cpu power for gnome and orca.

Actually, while 256m is a bit low, he does have the cpu power for
gnome and orca. I'm running gnome and orca here on a 1.1GHz Celeron
with 512M of ram. Though it is a bit sluggish, it does run, and well
enough to be practical for everyday use at that. I will also say that
I have tried running gnome and orca on a virtual machine inside of
virtualbox with 256M of ram, and it does run too, though more
sluggishly then natively with 512M of ram. I'm not sure if it runs more
sluggishly because of the lower amount of ram, or because of the
additional overhead that running a vm puts on the cpu.

Greg


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Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Tony Baechler]

I don't know a lot about Ubuntu, but I've read that if you boot directly 
to the installer instead of the live CD, it will take a while but it 
will install and work fine with 256 MB of RAM.  You might need sighted 
help, I'm not sure if the installer talks or not but it sounds like it 
wouldn't in your case anyway.  If you don't mind giving it a try, I 
would be interested to know if Orca works after the install without 
booting into the live CD.  Also, on a machine here with the same amount 
of memory, I always had to start Orca manually after it booted, even 
though I had sighted help verify that I was in fact booting into the 
mode where speech should come up automatically.  Once I manually started 
Orca, it was very slow but it eventually came up.  I would definitely 
not recommend running solely from the live CD because it's painfully 
slow but just doing an install is supposed to work.

Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	I did try the ubuntu live CD with orca and it did find
> the sound card because you can hear the bongo drums but the 256
> megs of RAM are not sufficient to make it all go when booting
> from the live CD so I am hoping that a thinner live CD will be
> the answer.
>   

Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Alex Snow]

For that machine I would probably run GRML since it's text-based.  My 
old latitude cpt (600mhz proc/324mb ram) runs it, so your machine 
should definitely do it.
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 03:52:29PM -0500, Martin 
McCormick wrote:
> 	I am going to download the talking CD images mentioned
> earlier this year on this list and have another go at a laptop I
> have that is really touchy about getting a talking Linux
> installation.
> 
> 	This was my wife's laptop until she got a Mac a couple
> of years ago and it did run Windows XP as well as any system
> runs Windows. It has 256 megs of RAM and a 1-gig processor so it
> is no slouch but it is about 6 years old now.
> 
> 	As luck would have it, the last edition of oralux which
> was out of date 2 years ago came up crowing and what passed for
> the HD installation process did install oralux with speakup
> although most of the bit about enabling speech turned out to be
> incomplete and one needed to kind of kick things along a bit to
> get it all to work but I did succeed.
> 
> 	It is, however, not up gradable and many things dealing
> with peripherals just don't quite work right no matter what one
> does.
> 
> 	I did try the ubuntu live CD with orca and it did find
> the sound card because you can hear the bongo drums but the 256
> megs of RAM are not sufficient to make it all go when booting
> from the live CD so I am hoping that a thinner live CD will be
> the answer.
> 
> 	In my job, I sometimes need to connect a RS-232 port to
> a device that is either partly dead or off-line due to network
> issues. A RS-232 dongle connected to the oralux laptop caused
> that spelling contingency bug to rear its ugly head although one
> could sure receive the data but it is only slightly more fun
> than water boarding. A PCMCIA serial port didn't seem to be
> recognized by kermit so  I am hoping that at least some of these
> problems will go away if the new ISO will work.
> 
> 	Do any of these issues sound familiar to others on the
> list?
> 
> 	Stay tuned for more thrills and spills.
> 
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
> Systems Engineer
> OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup

-- 
Linux is obsolete
	-- Andrew Tanenbaum

Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Gregory Nowak]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

FYI, I've found that when running with 256M of ram, and having orca
set to
launch after login, it does in fact launch, even though it seems not
to have launched. My solution is to login, wait a few minutes, do an
insert+q, tab over to the quit button, or whatever it is called, hit
enter, wait maybe half a minute, and restart orca. You should find
that the machine is more responsive with only one instance of orca
running, instead of 2. Note that even though the orca docs say that
orca will kill any previously running copies of itself when another
copy is launched, this isn't the case for me when running under 256M of
ram, thus the need to use insert+q to get out of orca, instead of just
starting it up right there. This is my experience on 256M of ram, and
your results may of course vary.

Greg


On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 03:49:39AM -0700, Tony Baechler wrote:
> I don't know a lot about Ubuntu, but I've read that if you boot directly  
> to the installer instead of the live CD, it will take a while but it  
> will install and work fine with 256 MB of RAM.  You might need sighted  
> help, I'm not sure if the installer talks or not but it sounds like it  
> wouldn't in your case anyway.  If you don't mind giving it a try, I  
> would be interested to know if Orca works after the install without  
> booting into the live CD.  Also, on a machine here with the same amount  
> of memory, I always had to start Orca manually after it booted, even  
> though I had sighted help verify that I was in fact booting into the  
> mode where speech should come up automatically.  Once I manually started  
> Orca, it was very slow but it eventually came up.  I would definitely  
> not recommend running solely from the live CD because it's painfully  
> slow but just doing an install is supposed to work.
>


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Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Glenn Ervin]

The memory is actually pretty easy to change on a laptop.
On all of the laptops I have done, I only had to open a little cover on the 
back, with one or two screws, and you will find the memory module.  It 
usually tilts back, to about a 45 degree angle, and then you squeeze a 
couple of clips, one on each end of the module, and pull the chip out.
Be sure to feel the memory chip and find a way to identify which side is 
which, so you can put in the new module the same way.
HTH.
Glenn
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Baechler" <tony@baechler.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup@braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:49 AM
Subject: Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk


I don't know a lot about Ubuntu, but I've read that if you boot directly
to the installer instead of the live CD, it will take a while but it
will install and work fine with 256 MB of RAM.  You might need sighted
help, I'm not sure if the installer talks or not but it sounds like it
wouldn't in your case anyway.  If you don't mind giving it a try, I
would be interested to know if Orca works after the install without
booting into the live CD.  Also, on a machine here with the same amount
of memory, I always had to start Orca manually after it booted, even
though I had sighted help verify that I was in fact booting into the
mode where speech should come up automatically.  Once I manually started
Orca, it was very slow but it eventually came up.  I would definitely
not recommend running solely from the live CD because it's painfully
slow but just doing an install is supposed to work.

Martin McCormick wrote:
> I did try the ubuntu live CD with orca and it did find
> the sound card because you can hear the bongo drums but the 256
> megs of RAM are not sufficient to make it all go when booting
> from the live CD so I am hoping that a thinner live CD will be
> the answer.
>

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Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

You might be right, I'm not sure.  I was using the 7.10 or 8.04 live CD, 
so hopefully the problem is fixed in newer versions.  However, the 
sighted help said that Orca wasn't running and I certainly had no 
speech.  When I launched it manually, I saw no indication of two copies 
running.  I think it was a bug in the CD though because it worked fine 
on a different machine with more memory and the instructions for booting 
with speech were wrong.  As I say, I'm sure the problem is fixed in 9.04 
but I went with grml instead which I later converted into Debian 
unstable.  I would still like to try Ubuntu again, perhaps in a virtual 
machine.

Gregory Nowak wrote:
> FYI, I've found that when running with 256M of ram, and having orca
> set to
> launch after login, it does in fact launch, even though it seems not
> to have launched. My solution is to login, wait a few minutes, do an
> insert+q, tab over to the quit button, or whatever it is called, hit
> enter, wait maybe half a minute, and restart orca. You should find
> that the machine is more responsive with only one instance of orca
> running, instead of 2. Note that even though the orca docs say that
> orca will kill any previously running copies of itself when another
> copy is launched, this isn't the case for me when running under 256M of
> ram, thus the need to use insert+q to get out of orca, instead of just
> starting it up right there. This is my experience on 256M of ram, and
> your results may of course vary.
>   

Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[tony seth]

If I mayh jump in briefly, you mentioned the spelling issue, which GRM> 
seems to have fixed, qand the latest one I think still does support 
hardware synths, at least it does on my old laptop.

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Re: Trying to get a Dell Enspiron Laptop to Talk

[Martin McCormick]

	Thanks to everyone. I'll get the latest grml this
weekend and have a go at that, first.

	There are a lot of systems around that would probably
talk and give good text console service that won't quite run
orca and all the resources it needs either because of the speed of the CPU
or amount of available ram. As one who is still using what
amounts to a talking serial terminal to connect to a TTY on a
Unix system for many applications, I am excited about the
talking distributions out there but the resource requirements to
get orca and speech running are pretty rigorous. I never
thought I see or, in this case, not hear the day when 256 megs
and a 1 GHZ processor wouldn't even boot the live CD, but all I
have to do is try the ubuntu live CD on such a system and it
starts, you hear the drums so it almost boots and then about ten
minutes later, you realize that there is trouble in paradise.

	My wife reports the screen is mostly blank with random
bits of light and color but that's it.

	It's too bad you can't do a talking ubunto install
without orca.

	I think software synthesis is the only way to go but it
must be able  to run as if it was a hardware synthesizer which
means no spelling because of interrupt service routines, etc.

	Part of my talking terminal is a screen reader I wrote
in 8086 assembler and I can absolutely swear as to how vexing
interrupt service routines can get because unless you have
parallel hardware, nothing ever really happens simultaneously
except for outside interrupts and then you must prioritize which
one you don't do now.

	The only way software speech can work right is for the
CPU that is doing the sound to not be the CPU that is handling
everything else. That is essentially hardware speech but using
the built-in sound hardware.


Martin McCormick