Hello.

[Effortless Union with the Divine]

Hi, hopefully this works, still getting the kinks worked out of this
Debian system. Speakup has presented a whole new world of opportunity to
the blind, and it feels excited to become involved with it. A few things
imediately noticed: Debian installation media needs updating. The reiser
disk doesn't work, and for the part where the installer needs to copy
the installation media, you need to use the regular root disk as opposed
to the speakup-enabled one. After getting the system installed OK, an
annoying bios problem tripped us up for a while, totally unrelated to
speakup of course, but just for note if anyone haas two drives, and lilo
just won't even load (use the serial option to hear it), a bug in the
bios may reverse the drive letters. For a stop-gap solution you can use
the swap and drive directives (read up on them) in the lilo.conf. Lilo
will complain bitterly, so you will have to get a sighted friend go into
the bios and disable the second hard drive. Also, maybe disabling the
hardware jumper on the second drive.

Back to the intallation, which went OK after that. Now some speakup 
problems:
using an Artic Transport.
The rate, vol, and pitch parameters don't seem to take imediate effect. 
Putting them in the append line of lilo.conf with the speakup_ser and 
speakup_synth parameters wich do work, doesn't. Putting them in 
~/.bash_profile doesn't work when logging in, though it does copy the 
correct values to the /proc/speakup files, it only takes effect when 
rerunning the .bash_profile. Strangeness. Anyone have any ideas?
Oh yes and that brings up the next question. This system ahas the 
awesomely enabling speakup-2.4.24 kernel image, from the Debian testing 
branch. Some posts refer to a new version of speakup, 2.0, available 
through cvs. Would anyone have any recommendations as to staying with 
the current setup, or getting cvs working, getting the new source, and 
making a custom kernel, which this would require, true?
Thanks for any help anyone can give. Speakup rocks. One post said 2.0 
allows easier reassigning of keys. Speaking of, where does debian keep 
that? Oh also, sometimes when reading the screen, it won't print a new 
line of text. Oh and it read the string
-rwx--x--x as a single - "dash".
and some cursor tracking would come in handy, say in lynx for arrowing 
to a link on which to hit d.

Seeya.

-- 
Currently playing: Koxbox
Good Vibes Radio: http://clearwhitelight.org/goodvibes

Omeron - Effortless Union with the Divine