Questions about new Linux setups

Questions about new Linux setups

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,

A few weeks ago my Linux box decided it would be a wonderful time to go to 
that great computer center in the sky. I was sitting here and the thing 
suddenly powered down, and won't power back up. Probably either a PSU or 
mobo blown. Time to upgrade anyhow, since I've had this box since 2005. 
Fortunately, when the Linux box went up to Linux box heaven, it didn't take 
the hard drive along for the ride, and I've already backed up all my data. I 
even have the same Linux system running on a less capable machine I had 
sitting around.

What I need to know is, what kinds of systems are people using these days 
for new Linux installs? I don't want to try to migrate my old system over to 
new hardware, since it was a hopelessly outdated Gentoo install. I probably 
wouldn't go with Gentoo again anyway. So what minimum hardware requirements, 
what distro? I'd love to play around with a GUI, but I absolutely can't 
stand Espeak! The GUY doesn't work with hardware synths, right? What about 
newer kernels and serial ports? If I do go with a GUI, is there any way to 
get Eloquence for it? Is anyone selling pre-built Linux systems for blind 
folks?
Thanks for any help!
Jayson 

Re: Questions about new Linux setups

[Kyle]

I run Arch here, and I love it. It starts out in the command line 
environment, and you can add only what you want to it, including full 
GNOME if you want. The Pacman packaging system is quite powerful, and 
few packages actually need to be built from source manually. 
Documentation is also very extensive and kept up-to-date for the most 
part. I highly recommend Arch for anyone who has some command line 
knowledge to get started and wants to maintain a mostly stable but also 
up-to-date system.

As for speech, I am not aware of any hardware speech that works with 
Orca, the GNOME screen reader. You can use eSpeak, eSpeak with Mbrola 
voices, Flite (only the Kal voice I believe), and there are a couple of 
ways to get Pico (the Android 2.3 voice) working. I can't recommend the 
synthesizer you know by the name Eloquence, as it goes by many other 
names and appears to be licensed and relicensed, sold and resold by many 
different companies, but no one seems to have the source code to fix all 
the terrible bugs, e.g. crashes on common typos, etc, and no one can 
rebuild it to be compatible with the current C libraries and such. 
Therefore, there is no 64-bit version of it, and it requires C libraries 
that are over 10 years old, which can introduce many security and 
stability issues into your new system. There are, however, other 
non-free speech synthesizers you can purchase if you don't like any of 
the free software options, most of which are kept updated and are 
compatible with more modern systems, but someone else may need to fill 
you in about those, because I only keep up with the free/open source 
voices. Hope this helps.
~Kyle
http://kyle.tk/
-- 
"Kyle? ... She calls her cake, Kyle?"
Out of This World, season 2 episode 21 - "The Amazing Evie"

Re: Questions about new Linux setups

[Jason White]

Kyle  <speakup@linux-speakup.org> wrote:
>I run Arch here, and I love it. It starts out in the command line 
>environment, and you can add only what you want to it, including full 
>GNOME if you want. The Pacman packaging system is quite powerful, and 
>few packages actually need to be built from source manually. 

I am considering Arch as an option whenever my next machine is purchased, or
maybe I'll just install it in a vm at some point.

It's also one of the few distributions (with debian and derivatives being the
other notable cases) that has an accessible installation process supporting
both speech and braille if I remember correctly. The accessible installer
unfortunately isn't the default yet, whereas in Debian it most certainly is -
no separate "accessible" image required.

A slightly annoying aspect of Arch, based on what I've read, is that it
doesn't support separate packages for debug symbols. If you need a stack trace
to report a bug, you'll have to rebuild the relevant package with a debug
flag.

In general, though, I think Arch is the most interesting distribution to have
emerged in the last decade.