speakup laptop research

[Steve Holmes]

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Just like any other computer, Speakup shouldn't have any real problems.
My biggest concern for any computer to be used conveniently with
Speakup is to have a serial port available.  I say this because you can
always gain access to a synth while installing Linux for the first time
and in the event the sound card isn't supported.  I recently installed
Slackware 10.2 on a Toshiba laptop that had a serial port and my
Speakout, the job went smoothly.  Getting software speech took another
week or two to get going because I had a devil of a time getting the
kernel to be compatible with the on-board soundcard.  That's one reason
I feel so strongly about serial ports on a linux based computer - laptop
or otherwise.  I now use that same laptop with software speech (Espeak
and speech dispatcher quite regular now.

My Toshiba is surprisingly small in resources but still runs text based
linux quite well.  I only have 32 meg of RAM with a 266 MMX processor.
Sometimes things seem to get swapped out and would appear to be locked
up but I'm sure that pertains to the lack of resources.  I just stuck an
80 GB harddrive in it and that went flawlessly!  Speakup does have a
laptop keymap  or I should say that laptop key combos are included in
the standard keymap so Speakup navigation keys are available.  I redid a
few of them for my tastes but is quite usable in the default form.  One
thing I like about my older laptop is the two PCMCIA slots so I can
stick in network and/or wireless cards when I want. And it does have a
single USB port though it is only 1.1.

Anyway, just about anything they give you should work.  I would be more
concerned with general compatibility between Linux in general and
hardware than I would about Speakup in particular.

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 10:51:20PM -0400, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> It could be smartco.org may be able to provide me with a used and 
> refurbished laptop in exchange for some of the hours I worked at 
> smartco.org disassembling computers.  What smartco needs to know is what 
> would be specs for a useable laptop as opposed to a laptop that's best not 
> used to run speakup-enabled Linux.  I have grml here and got it installed 
> on a hard drive for a desktop computer last night and also have debian and 
> slackware 10.2 as a result of a slackware subscription.  Smartco does not 
> want to provide me with something that isn't useable so I've been asked to 
> do sme research.
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 
> 

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