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* Re: Speakup and vinux
@  Martin McCormick
   ` Pia
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Martin McCormick @  UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.

	It should load just fine as the operating system with
speakup appears to take up a couple of gigabytes. The
middle-sized ISO image is around 400 megabytes and gives you
enough to get started. I remember the painful feeling when I
first started using Unix in 1989. It is easy to forget things
that now seem second nature but were once show stoppers.

	If you are familiar with Linux, vinux is standard Debian
Linux with speech on the console. If you are new to Unix, find a
friend who knows more than you do to at least help you get
started. Remember that if you are not root, you can't hurt much
except for deleting your own files. There is no undelete that
works well as Unix systems are always doing something with files
and sectors that you don't need any more are marked as free and
the OS may just snap them right up a second later and turn them
in to syslog or something else.

	Unix and all its various flavors like Sunos, AIX and
FreeBSD to name a few, don't require defragmentation of the hard
drive as they constantly act like a very thorough file clerk in
an office who can't stand to see disorder so they are always
looking for pieces of files and making sure they all fit
together in contiguous blocks so that the OS doesn't have to
waste time to gather them from here and there. In other words,
when you rm a file, it is often-times gone for good for all
practical purposes.

	The nice thing about a live CD is that you do not have
to write so much as one byte to your hard drive in order to test
it out. Burn the iso image to a CDROM and boot from that. As
long as you don't run the installer, you aren't going to modify
your present setup. You will hear it start to talk some time
after the boot process starts and you will get a shell just as
if you were logged in.

	Be really careful if you decide to install it as you
don't want to destroy your Windows partitions. You can set it up
so that you have a short time to decide whether you want to boot
Windows or Linux. One thing to watch out for is that the boot
sector for Linux mustn't clobber the Windows boot sector. It
does sometimes happen. I haven't ever set up a multiple-boot
system so I can't help much there

	The best of luck as you learn about vinux.

Martin McCormick

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: Speakup and vinux
@  Martin McCormick
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Martin McCormick @  UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.

I reported earlier that I had installed vinux on a Gateway P.C.
with only 64 megs of RAM and it did not completely build. This
has nothing to do with speech except that I could sure hear the
errors. Well, I gave that system another try but increased the
swap partition by adding a second swap at the expense of the
primary one such that I now have about 256 megs of swap space.

	the Live CD detects any swaps you have already set but
since this was new one, I used 

swapon /dev/hda3

as that was its partition number. To see your swap, use swapon
-s and it should report everything it sees as swap space.

	This morning, I left for work before it had stopped
grinding on this new installation, but so far, there have been
no more errors of the "no space left on device" type.

	If it is still appearing to load this evening, I will
know it is stuck in never-never land, but I expect it to finish.

	The moral of the story is to not be too cheap when
setting up swap if you have limited RAM.

	I did try vinux on another system at work that presently
has Windows on its hard drive and limited RAM and it will not
even send the 5 bells at the beginning of the boot sequence. It
probably has no Unix swap space at all so I will just need to
find about 190 megs of RAM so it can build its RAM disks.

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Speakup and vinux
@  Martin McCormick
   ` Janitha Rukmal
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 16+ messages in thread
From: Martin McCormick @  UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.

Hello and happy New Year.

	Over the New Year's weekend, I downloaded and installed
the middle-sized version of vinux which is a version of Debian
Linux which boots up speaking and uses speakup as the speech
engine. This is a game changer for me and I think it should be
one for a number of others who own middle-aged to slightly older
computers that are not ready for the attic or the recyclers yet,
but are not bleeding-edge dream machines with gigs of RAM and
terrabytes of disk storage.

	You can read about vinux at

http://vinux-development.blogspot.com/

	There is a minimal iso image, a mid-sized one and a set
of 4, I think, CDROM images for a complete Linux installation
from CD.

	I tried the vinux installation on 3 systems. One is a
Gateway system from 1995 or so. It only presently has 64 megs of
RAM and that is really not enough. The speech works, but
aptitude barfs every time you try to install anything and
complains about running out of memory. Also, there were numerous
errors during the installation stating that there was no space
left on the device. I believe that is probably the virtual disk
created from available RAM of which there is far too little.

	Amazingly, the speech is fine. The remedy is to find
some more memory and try the installation again as I don't know
what all didn't get installed.

	The second system was that laptop. It has finally met
its match. The installation went smoothly and it now has 6
virtual consoles that talk when you need them.

	Just for fun, I tried to add mplayer and mpg123. They
went right in and speechdispatcher and the other alsa services
all seem to play nicely together. You hear speakup mixed right
in with the music or whatever audio one is listening to and
neither seems to disrupt the other.

	I also tried recording with a microphone. I still may
not have amixer set right but the recordings are much better and
consistent each time. That laptop has no line input although
amixer reports a Line input. This system appears to be working
although I haven't tried a PCMCIA serial port yet.

	The third system is another oldie from around 2000 at
work. I had a terrible time formatting the hard drive for Linux
because it had had FreeBSD on it and I didn't know you can't
just format the drive with ext3 file systems. You start with a
ext2 and use makee2fs -j /PARTITIONNAME and things are much
better afterward.

	Now for the slightly bad news. When you install vinux,
you get a British keyboard. I am sure there are plenty of
British people who feel the same way when they get a US
keyboard. The British and US keyboards are mostly identical but
the differences can drive one crazy when you are used to one and
now confronted with the other.

	The shift of the number 2 gives you a double quotation
mark. The key that should send the \ gives you a number or
Pounds sign as in shift-3. The Caps-lock key does not announce
as it toggles and you soon discover that setting it involves the
normal speakup sequence of shift-capslock but clearing it
requires just a tap on the Caps-lock. Also, the Caps-lock on the
UK keyboard shifts numbers and punctuation marks as if one was
really holding down the Shift key. That's bad when you have
punctuations in a password.

	If any of you install vinux, you can temporarily get a
US keyboard by entering the following command after su'ing to
root:

loadkeys us

	Not only do you magically get an American keyboard map,
but the Caps-lock starts announcing its status each time you
change it and it also works the way we are used to seeing it
work.

	When you get vinux installed, the way to permanently
change to a US keyboard is complicated slightly by the fact that
the instructions do not work quite right.

	You are supposed to type install-keymap us and a new
boot-time keyboard map should be copied to
/etc/console-setup/boottime.kmap.gz or something close but it
doesn't happen. I discovered after some poking around that it
installs the keymap in to /etc/console for some reason. To fix
that, you must manually copy that file to /etc/console-setup/
and then it all works.

	I got in touch with the fellow who wrote the vinux
distribution and told him how much I appreciate the effort he
has made. As far as I am concerned, it has made a lot of
equipment that was gathering dust useful again. I can now turn
off a setup I have been using for 23 years which includes an
Echo P.C. synthesizer. It has worked well for all these years,
but it is time to modernize.

	Sorry for the length of this message, but I think vinux
adds more options to making Unix/Linux more accessible and that
is what it is all about.

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

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~ UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
 Speakup and vinux Martin McCormick
 ` Pia
 ` Øyvind Lode
   ` Øyvind Lode
   ` Georgina Joyce
   ` Kerry Hoath
     ` Janitha Rukmal
       ` Georgina Joyce
       ` Kerry Hoath
     ` Georgina Joyce
       ` Kerry Hoath
 ` Don Raikes
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
 Martin McCormick
 Martin McCormick
 ` Janitha Rukmal
   ` Don Raikes

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