Hewlet Packard and Linux

[Janina Sajka]

Charles:

A couple of things about this:

1.)	My experience with vendor installed linux is that they often don't
install alll the packages I need. I have seen this with my IBM laptop,
which came with Caldera 2.4 Desktop preinstalled, and with Redhat 7.0 (my
own installation), when I selected the "laptop" install. I have reverted
to doing custom installs. My experience is that the default vendor
installs are skewed toward the gui (not surprisingly) and that, therefore,
various console utilities are missing. Now, one can certainly add these by
hand, but it's just easier to install them up front and not mess with some
vendor's idea of what you should have;

2.)	It is unlikely hp (or any other vendor) will speech-enable their
linux installs until these are part of the distributions themselves--until
speakup is part of Redhat, Debian, Slackware, etc. That's the effort that
will pay off best, imho;

3.)	We may not actually want to speech enable your server. Radical as
that sounds, speakup does slow down the computer, in my experience. Kirk,
may not agree, but this is my experience, and that of several others. Let
me defend this suggestion by asking why we would put speech on the machine
if we're going to locate it at some server farm were we're never going to
see it? All administration will be done over the wire--so the machine
should be built optimized for access over the wire, and not for access on
a local console, imho;

Just my two cents on this. Glad to see that you're getting more
comfortable about the commercial viability of linux, though! <big grin>

 On
Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Charles Crawford wrote:

> 	I don't know what others may know about this, but I was impressed when I
> went over to the HP.com page to discover they have linux servers and
> desktops for sale.  Very interesting indeed.  Now I need to contact them
> and make sure they have the versions that support speech.  Maybe, we could
> actually get them to offer speech interface as a feature when prchasing is
> made?
>
> -- Charlie.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

-- 

				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

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