Hellow, list; I installed vinux which is a version of Debian Linux that is optimized for blind and visually-impaired users so it comes up speaking. This is a little gem. As the owner of several still-serviceable but older computers, vinux gives new life to them.
I tried the ubuntu-live CD on a Dell laptop dating back to 2003. It contains 256 megs of RAM but still died due to lack of RAM. The "vinux" live CD is a talking console using speakup and appears to be a one-man effort. http://vinux-development.blogspot.com/ I mention it on this list because I saw a previous posting from somebody who was trying to find a mailing list for vinux. We need something like this in a main distribution because not every system in the real world is cutting-edge technology nor is it ready for the recyclers either. When I put vinux on the laptop, it simply started to work. The only issues are that you must do something about the keyboard if you live in the United States. You get a UK keyboard by default. All the letters and numbers are where you expect them, but try typing in a Email address or redirecting a Unix command via the pipe symbol and you get a few surprises. The @ sign and double-quote keys are swapped and several others are not where you are used to finding them. The Caps-lock key does not announce its status but the high pitch of the echoed key strokes lets you know after the fact, and so on. The loadkeys us commands fixes that and, strangely enough, the Caps-lock announces its status and toggles normally when shifted which is a normal behavior under speakup. The fun starts when trying to make the US keyboard the default at boot time. You should be able to run install-keymap us to replace the default boot-time keymap. It doesn't work and an exhaustive trouble-shooting session turned up that under vinux, install-keymap was putting the new map in /etc/console when it should have put it in /etc/console-setup. Someone simply goofed. After fixing the keyboard, the rest is more than I ever hoped for. The speech dispatcher and the audio devices for playing and recording sound peacefully coexist. From a previous Oralux distribution on that same laptop, I know that sound barely worked at all. You could get speech but speech and anything else usually worked poorly or not at all and failed in ways that I am sure were interrupt and contingency-related. As a final blow, the version of speakup that was part of Oralux was one of the older versions that went in to painfully-slow spelling mode when one tried to use a RS-232 serial converter on the USB port. I haven't tried a serial port under vinux, but everything else actually works as expected. I really think separate special distributions are not the best answer because, when the developer moves on or passes on, the project dies and we are back to trying to hammer square pegs in to roud holes or whatever analogy you like to describe the frustration of trying to mate pieces that don't fit the. The accessibility project for orca and ubuntu is nothing short of amazing. If we could only have a way of starting the live CD in vinux mode so that vinux grows along with the main distribution, we would have it made in the shade. The author of vinux actually describes such a hope in the blog. As a final thought, I also installed vinux on a 1995-vintage Gateway system with only 64 megs of RAM but a 400-MHZ processor. The speech works flawlessly but 64 megs is just not enough to let aptitude work correctly so I will have to add at least 64 more megs and then reinstall vinux as the virtual disk wasn't big enough to let the installation process work properly. I am really surprised it works at all. Sorry for the length of this message but I needed to explain why this is a very important and useful development. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility