Re: [arch-general] Winter Cleanup of [community]
Andrea Scarpino writes: On Monday 28 January 2013 18:09:04 Chris Brannon wrote: Well, it looks like espeakup got cleaned. Could someone please add it back? It is pretty much necessary for blind users, of which there are a few. If it really needs a maintainer that badly, I'd consider reapplying for my TU position. I moved it back. Many thanks! -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] Winter Cleanup of [community]
Alexander Rødseth rods...@gmail.com writes: Hi, It's time again for the yearly cleanup of the [community] repository. Somehow, time passed, and it's now too late for a Christmas Cleanup like last year. Instead I'm announcing a Winter Cleanup, which I think is a better name as well. Well, it looks like espeakup got cleaned. Could someone please add it back? It is pretty much necessary for blind users, of which there are a few. If it really needs a maintainer that badly, I'd consider reapplying for my TU position. Thanks, -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] btrfs talking install question
Tom Gundersen t...@jklm.no writes: A suggestion to make this a bit easier on the users: if you were to ship a /usr/lib/modules-load.d/espeakup.conf file with espeakup containing: speakup_soft speakup Then these will be loaded on boot as long as espeakup is installed (which sounds sane to me). Yes, that would be quite useful. Thanks for the suggestion. I also need to add a systemd unit to the espeakup package. I wrote one a few weeks ago, when I switched to systemd. It has been submitted upstream as well. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] /etc/profile PATH variable wrong
Jude DaShiell jdash...@shellworld.net writes: In order for that to be correct it needs to also have :/usr/local/bin inside of the quote marks. The /usr/local/bin directory on Linux systems like slackware and debian is where stuff gets put that anyone can execute that's on the system. I suspect that /usr/local/bin is excluded from the default $PATH to encourage good system administration habits. I.E., all of the software installed on a system should be managed by the package manager. When I used Slackware, /usr/local was the dumping ground where I placed all of the software that I built from source. It was an uncontrolled mess. I'm really ashamed to admit it. Keeping /usr/local/bin out of $PATH discourages people from using ./configure, make, make install as their package management procedure. The hand-written, system-specific scripts pose a problem, though. Does anyone use makepkg + pacman to manage these? Is it worth the extra effort? -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] my intro
David C. Rankin drankina...@suddenlinkmail.com writes: Seriously, what tools are available that, I guess in some sense, must speak the prompts so you know what's going on? These tools are known as screenreaders. They usually provide at least two functions: 1. Speak text as it appears, and 2. Allow the user to manually review the contents of the screen. The only thing I can think of is some type of modification to the prompt that would process the prompt though an OCR utility and then to a text-to-speech app, It's simpler than that. No OCR is involved, since the text is already machine-readable. but what about before that setup is installed? That's pretty amazing and sounds like some cool technology. The software is available on my custom ISO image. The system starts talking shortly after someone boots a machine with a CD or USB stick containing that image. He or she does the install, taking care to add some extra packages at the end of the process. After rebooting from the HD, the system should start speaking. -- Chris Website: http://the-brannons.com/
Re: [arch-general] PulseAudio in [extra]
Jan Steffens jan.steff...@gmail.com writes: On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Chris Brannon cmbran...@cox.net wrote: How will this affect people who don't wish to run PulseAudio? Â Can they still have their ALSA OSS emulation, or will they need to run PulseAudio for applications which still use OSS? Most desktop users would want to blacklist the OSS emulation - it doesn't support software mixing. *SNIP* An even better alternative is osspd, which uses CUSE to provide the devices. It can redirect to either ALSA or PulseAudio. If disabling the OSS emulation would be made the default, and the modules only loaded if added to MODULES in rc.conf, I would welcome that. Disabling OSS preclaim for everyone by altering the kernel config should be safe to do. It's even in the feature removal schedule: Thanks for the answer. All of this sounds good, and I like your plan. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] PulseAudio in [extra]
Jan Steffens jan.steff...@gmail.com writes:
*SNIP*
Any comments are welcome.
I am willing to apply as a junior dev to get this done, should it be approved.
Your plan leaves me with a question. Here's a quote from that
document:
TODO:
- What about the neccessary kernel changes?
1. Blacklist snd-{pcm,mixer,seq}-oss (tto kill off ALSA's OSS
emulation)
This is apparently the common cause of Flash or other applications
hogging the audio device. Also happens when you run ALSA dmix, so
it's not specific to PulseAudio.
2. Boot with soundcore.preclaim_oss=0 (required for osspd)
How will this affect people who don't wish to run PulseAudio? Can they
still have their ALSA OSS emulation, or will they need to run PulseAudio
for applications which still use OSS?
-- Chris
[arch-general] announce: latest snapshot of the TalkingArch CD for blind users
Hi all, I'm proud to announce the April 2010 snapshot of my TalkingArch CD for blind users. This is more-or-less equivalent to the netinstall CD, with one major difference. The system provides spoken feedback as soon as you boot with the disk. I made some improvements to the project since the last release in the fall of 2009. First, I now provide an x86_64 image, as well as an image for i686. I learned that I could use qemu to build the 64-bit version. Second, the CD now includes a brltty package, for people who wish to use braille displays. Here's the link to my project: http://the-brannons.com/tarch/ If you're blind, please check it out. Likewise, if you know anyone who might be interested, please spread the word. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] heimdal-1.3.2-1 (from testing) still linked against openssl 0.9.8
Chris Brannon cmbran...@cox.net writes: Hi, According to ldd, the heimdal package in [testing] is still linked against openssl 0.9.8. This shouldn't be the case, should it? Scratch that. readelf -d tells me that it does link against libcrypto.so.1.0.0. Sorry for the noise! -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] building x86_64 packages under qemu?
Tobias Powalowski t.p...@gmx.de writes: Am Montag 11 Januar 2010 schrieb Chris Brannon: Is there any reason why building x86_64 packages under qemu-system-x86_64 would be a bad idea? It is a little slow, but it is usable. Plus, qemu has a curses interface. why not using a chroot for this? ok this only works if you have a 64bit machine running. Right, I don't have 64-bit hardware. That's the only reason I'm interested in this approach. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] building x86_64 packages under qemu?
Thomas Bächler tho...@archlinux.org writes: It is not a little slow, but painfully slow (remember: the compiler runs in an emulated environment, where each CPU instruction issued by the compiler is translated into a CPU instruction that the host CPU understands, and the result is somehow translated back). Yes, I've noticed that the ./configure step is especially painful, because of all of the little test programs that it compiles. Running ./configure for a small project took the good part of half an hour. If you really want to do this, it might be better (but surely not easier, this is rather Voodoo) to port makepkg to using a cross-compiler toolchain. Sounds risky, as well. At some point, it'll become worthwhile to simply upgrade my platform. -- Chris
[arch-general] building x86_64 packages under qemu?
Is there any reason why building x86_64 packages under qemu-system-x86_64 would be a bad idea? It is a little slow, but it is usable. Plus, qemu has a curses interface. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] Kernel 2.6.32 Broken
Heiko Baums li...@baums-on-web.de writes: If you, too, don't use [testing] and get kernel panics then this is because there is at least one important package update which is needed by kernel26 2.6.32.2-2 missing in [core]. I guess it's mkinitcpio. If you update your system to [testing] then it works again. I'm running 2.6.32.2-1 just fine on a box that has never had [testing] enabled. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] A universal Operating System API - why don't we have it?
Laurie Clark-Michalek bluepepp...@archlinux.us writes: Java? The success of the language is based around the fact that almost every computer has the runtime installed, regardless of operating system. Does that not count as a global API? The concept is called write once, run anywhere. An early example is UCSD Pascal, developed in the late 1970s. UCSD Pascal's P-code is somewhat analogous to JVM bytecode. There were implementations of the P-code interpreter for many early microcomputers. Perhaps UCSD Pascal would have been more popular if it weren't so expensive. IIRC, the IBM PC version was priced at $495. MS-DOS was cheaper. Java may be the most popular example of write once, read anywhere, but it was not the first. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] A universal Operating System API - why don't we have it?
Pierre Chapuis catw...@archlinux.us writes: There are things like that (think NDIS - it's Microsoft, but it's a step in the right direction), just not enough , but I think it's a question of time. And then there's the UDI (universal driver interface) (UDI), which Stallman doesn't like. I can certainly see arguments for both sides of that issue. As an aside, I interviewed for a job with MS last year. At some point, the device driver issue was discussed. One of my interviewers made the comment that a universal driver interface would be a bad thing, because it reduces competition. I don't think that they like commoditized things at all. -- Chris
[arch-general] programmable API for flyspray?
Is there any way to access bugs.archlinux.org programmatically? I'd love to be able to manipulate it from the shell. TIA, -- Chris
[arch-general] sound busted after upgrade to kernel 2.6.30?
My sound was busted yesterday when I upgraded from kernel 2.6.29 to 2.6.30. I had to regenerate my asound.state. At first, I thought it was just my problem, because I use the softvol plugin. This gave me trouble in the past. A friend of mine reported the same experience, so someone else had audio problems on upgrade as well. What happened to ALSA? Did anyone else have the same trouble? Regards, -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] Move junit from Extra to Unsupported
Eric Belanger wrote: No packages in extra depends on bcprov. But both bcprov and junit are needed by community packages so if they are removed from extra they'll need to go in community repo. Is there a TU willing to adopt/maintain them? I am willing, unless some more knowledgable person is interested. -- Chris
[arch-general] ArchLinux install CD for the blind, version 2!
I am proud to announce the second release of a modified ArchLinux install CD that includes spoken output for blind users. It is mostly equivalent to the official ftp CD, but the system should start speaking as soon as you boot with it. Speech is provided via the sound card, using the eSpeak software synthesizer and the Speakup screenreader. This CD is only available for the i686 platform; x86-64 is not supported. There are two versions: an Isolinux version and a Grub version. One may obtain .iso images via HTTP. Grub: Download URL: http://cmb.tysdomain.com/talkingarch-2009.02-ftp-i686.iso MD5 sum: 932d49d5093e50d8c5fb14527afd17fa Isolinux: Download URL: http://cmb.tysdomain.com/talkingarch-2009.02-ftp-i686-isolinux.iso MD5 sum: 28fa806a745e26424596259a71fc9d64 Thanks to Tyler Littlefield for hosting these files. The following list of steps is a brief guide to installing ArchLinux using this CD. If anyone has trouble with it, send me a private email. The instructions assume that your root partition will be mounted on /mnt. 0. When booting, Grub provides a very long timeout. Press enter once the drive stops spinning. 1. Use the installer on the CD, as per the beginner's guide. 2. Install the alsa-utils and espeak packages: pacman --root=/mnt -S alsa-utils espeak 3. Install the speakup and espeakup packages. These are not yet available in the community repository. There are two ways to install them, depending on how much you trust me. Alternative 1: Use the binary packages from my website. I promise that the speakup package will always match the kernel version available from the official ArchLinux repositories. Append the following two lines to /etc/pacman.conf and /mnt/etc/pacman.conf: [blind] Server = http://members.cox.net/cmbrannon/blind/i686 Install the packages from my custom repository: pacman --root=/mnt -Sy speakup espeakup Alternative 2: Build the packages from source, using the PKGBUILDs available from the Arch User Repository. For convenience, the URLs are: http://aur.archlinux.org/download/speakup/speakup.tar.gz http://aur.archlinux.org/download/espeakup/espeakup.tar.gz If I were going to choose this option, I would probably chroot into the newly installed ArchLinux system in order to build the packages. 4. Customize /mnt/etc/rc.conf: Add speakup and speakup_soft to the MODULES array. Add alsa and espeakup to the DAEMONS array. 5. You also need to save the state of the sound card, so that it will be retrieved on reboot. Execute the command alsactl store and copy the file /etc/asound.state to /mnt/etc/asound.state. Alternatively, alsactl -f /mnt/etc/asound.state store 6. When you boot the system from the hard disk, it should start speaking. The ArchLinux developers build their CD images using a set of shell scripts and configuration files named archiso. I added a configuration to archiso that allows me to build accessible CDs. If someone wants to produce customized images containing Speakup, he can do the following. Grab sources using git: git clone http://members.cox.net/cmbrannon/archiso.git git checkout --track -b talkinginst origin/talkinginst All of my work is done on the talkinginst branch. The master branch mirrors the master branch from git://projects.archlinux.org/archiso.git Now you have a copy in archiso/. Install the scripts contained in archiso/archiso. In order to create the image, pacman needs to be able to find the speakup and espeakup packages. Add my custom [blind] package repository to /etc/pacman.conf on the host system, as described in the instructions for installing from CD. Change to the archiso/configs/talkinginst directory, and type make ftp-iso. Alternatively, make BOOTLOADER=syslinux ftp-iso yields an image having Isolinux as its bootloader. There are several more targets for make. For instance, ftp-usb produces an image suitable for a flash drive. Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with ArchLinux. I don't even have Trusted User status in the community. This CD image is not an official release. It is not endorsed by anyone other than myself. It is provided solely for the convenience of its creator and other blind users. It comes with absolutely no warranty. With kind regards, -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] customized ArchLinux install CD with speech support
raca [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Nice project :) I will not use or knows anyone I know but that is English speech you are talking about, right? Unfortunately, it just supports English speech at present. This is a problem that is definitely on my mind! Regards, -- Chris
[arch-general] customized ArchLinux install CD with speech support
I am happy to announce the first release of a modified ArchLinux CD for i686 with speech support. The .iso should be almost equivalent to the FTP installer, with one exception: it starts speaking at boot. One may obtain the image via HTTP or via BitTorrent. Download URL: http://cmb.tysdomain.com/talking-arch-ftp.iso Torrent: http://members.cox.net/cmbrannon/talking-arch-ftp.iso.torrent Note that it is a trackerless torrent, and it won't work with older clients. Thanks to Tyler for hosting the downloadable image. The following list of steps is a brief guide to installing ArchLinux with speech. I haven't tested the install process, because my machines are all occupied. If anyone has trouble with it, send me a private email. The instructions assume that your root partition will be mounted on /mnt. Change /mnt to something else if this assumption doesn't hold. 1. Use the installer on the CD, as per the beginner's guide. 2. Install the alsa-utils and espeak packages: pacman --root=/mnt -S alsa-utils espeak 3. Install the speakup and espeakup packages. These are not yet available in the community repository. There are two ways to install them, depending on how much you trust me. Alternative 1: Use the binary packages from my website. I promise that the speakup package will always match the kernel version available from the official repos. Append the following two lines to /etc/pacman.conf and /mnt/etc/pacman.conf: [blind] Server = http://members.cox.net/cmbrannon/blind/i686 Install the packages from my custom repository: pacman --root=/mnt -Sy speakup espeakup Alternative 2: Build the packages from source, using the PKGBUILDs available from unsupported. For convenience, the URLs are: http://aur.archlinux.org/download/speakup/speakup.tar.gz http://aur.archlinux.org/download/espeakup/espeakup.tar.gz If I were going to choose this option, I would probably chroot into the newly installed ArchLinux system in order to build the packages. 4. Customize /mnt/etc/rc.conf: Add speakup and speakup_soft to the MODULES array. Add alsa and espeakup to the DAEMONS array. We also need to save the state of the sound card, so that it will be retrieved on reboot. Execute the command alsactl store and copy the file /etc/asound.state to /mnt/etc/asound.state. When you boot the system from the hard disk, it should start speaking. -- Chris Disclaimers: I am in no way associated with ArchLinux. This CD image is not an official release. It is provided solely for the convenience of myself and other blind / visually impaired users. It comes with absolutely no warranty. Download and use at your own risk. -- Chris
[arch-general] state of archiso?
I may have found an issue with the archiso scripts. The hooks /lib/initcpio/hooks/boot-cd and /lib/initcpio/hooks/boot-usb call on /sbin/udevsettle and /sbin/udevtrigger, but those binaries no longer exist. -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] Offer help for our ISO building
Aaron Griffin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 12:00 PM, Angel Velásquez [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What about support for accesibility people?, a friend (FlaPer87) and i can help with some thoughts for accesibility stuff. Just tell me what needs to be done. Is it a simple matter of adding some packages to the ISO, or do certain things need to be run on startup as well? The following applies to spoken output for the blind. Not sure about other sorts of accessibility. Certain things need to be run on startup. Sound should be unmuted, and volume should be set to something reasonable. Perhaps: amixer set Master 80% unmute amixer set PCM 80% unmute We need a daemon and a couple of kernel modules. The modules are speakup and speakup_soft, and the daemon is called espeakup. I have PKGBUILDs for these in unsupported: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/speakup/speakup.tar.gz http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/espeakup/espeakup.tar.gz The binary packages espeak and alsa-utils are used, and they bring in several dependencies. Most folks won't want speech at boot, so it should be optional. Perhaps a script could examine /proc/cmdline and start speech if the user supplied a certain argument to the bootloader? -- Chris
Re: [arch-general] anyone had problems with archlinux-2008.06-ftp-i686.iso?
Aaron Griffin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I agree. At the very least, we can offer an alternate accessibility version which would have tools like this for blind users and the like. Chris, what software do you need, or think others may need, when it comes to things like this? Thank you so much for your interest! I hope that the following discussion is concise, because this is complex. Software necessary for a talking boot: * alsa-utils (to unmute the soundcard at boot) * espeak (a text-to-speech engine available in [community]) * speakup (a kernel-based screenreader, not currently available in Arch) * speech-dispatcher and speechd-up (see below) Speakup is only available from a git repository. There is a tarball somewhere on their website, but it is terribly stale. I mirror the git repo, so I could send a tarball of the recent sources. Previous versions required one to patch the kernel, but the latest version can be built without applying patches, as long as one is using a 2.6.26 (or later) kernel. There's also a user-space screenreader for the console, and that is what I used on my remastered ISO. It has to be started after logging in, so most blind people don't like it. OTOH, Speakup gives one a talking login prompt. If one uses a hardware synthesizer, he can have speech as soon as the modules are loaded. If he uses a software speech synthesizer like espeak, then speech can start from the init scripts. We also need software to communicate between speakup and the espeak TTS engine. That's what speech-dispatcher and speechd-up are for. Speakup just sends text to a character device called /dev/softsynth. The tarball for speech-dispatcher is here: http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.7.tar.gz The tarball for speechd-up is stale (late 2006). The CVS version has quite a few improvements and bugfixes. I've built and installed all of these packages from source on other distros, so I'll gladly learn to use makepkg and contribute some pkgbuilds. Thomas asked about squashfs overlays and boot options. Plenty of other distros require that we type something at the boot prompt to get speech. We can't read the prompt, but we can listen for the CD drive to stop spinning. A long timeout from the bootloader helps here. The other option is that remastering the CD was goofy. I expect the iso was unpacked, and software added to it which may or may not have been built against the same libraries. I am assuming Chris did not go through the process of building the ISO with archiso. Aaron is correct. I linked some programs against libraries from Debian, and I didn't go through the archiso process. Bet this is the problem. The drive and media seem good, because I can copy the data back to the HD without issues. -- Chris
[arch-general] anyone had problems with archlinux-2008.06-ftp-i686.iso?
Hi list, I'm new to Arch. The other day, I downloaded the ISO mentioned in the subject line. I remastered the image, because I needed some extra programs. I'm blind. I added a screenreader and a text-to-speech engine to the ISO, so that I could have spoken feedback during the install. I also added alsa-utils, alsa-lib, and a few miscellaneous packages. I burned the CD and booted the system. Arch started talking to me, and everything seemed ok. After a few minutes, I started noticing strange behavior. The system froze when I tried to execute a command. For instance, after typing ps at the bash prompt, the system locked up. It was unable to load the ps executable or one of its shared libraries from the CD. Sometimes, it would print the message input-output error, and return to a working bash prompt. I could hear my CD-ROM drive clicking whenever it tried to load the executable. It just sat there for five or more minutes, spinning and clicking. I also noticed that Arch is writing data to its unionfs. Most of the data seems to be written to /var/log. Should a live CD be writing to logfiles? My problems could be caused by one of several things. 1. A broken CD-ROM drive. (I doubt it, because the drive is 3 weeks old). 2. A mistake while remastering the ISO. 3. Some sort of error from the original ISO. Has anyone else had trouble with this image? If not, then the issue must be caused by my hardware or personal configuration. Regards, -- Chris
