Lindows preview.

Jason unleet at qwest.net
Tue Nov 27 12:10:21 EST 2001


OK, here's the deal on "lindows"
It uses "Wine", a "Windows compatability layer" for linux. Wine requires X. 
My best guess is that JAWS for windows won't run under Wine. I don't have a 
copy to test with myself, but knowing what I do about the way Wine seperates 
programs from each other quite a bit more than Windows does I doubt the 
needed "common ground" that JAWS depends on would be present.

Oh yeah, as an aside, the version of Wine that lindows will ship with is 
modified slightly; it contains significantly better support for DirectX and 
OpenGL than the regular version of Wine.

On a completely unrelated note, it could be possible to write a version of 
Wine that doesn't use X and simply dumps text to a console for speakup, or 
whatever else, to read. No, I'm not volunteering for that project :-P
But if anytone happens to want to start a project to hack X and the relevent 
toolkit libraries into accessible submission, I'll join, I've even got the 
beginnings of a structure worked out for all of it.

(hmmm.... this e-mail got a lot longer than I intended)

On Tuesday November 27, 2001 02:35 am, you wrote:
> the same question occurred to me too.
> but it also occurred to me that if lindows is able to run both linux and
> windows programs as suggested, would you not be able to run your
> existing windows screen reader as well as speakup?
> of course not at the same time <evil grin>
> I thought that the idea of lindows was to have a thin translation layer
> for interpreting windows stuff.
> at least that's what I remember from what I've seen about it anyway.
> On




More information about the Speakup mailing list