Thoughts on newbies getting stuck

[Debee Norling]

Since there are a lot of new beginners on this list, I'll make this comment
which is already obvious to the more advanced users.

If you are new to Linux and struggling to get it installed and/or want to
play with software speech, you should try fooling around with Oralux
	www.oralux.org

This is a Knoppix-based distro intended for blind users. It will not affect
any data on your hard disk as it boots from the CD-rom.  However anything
you want to preserve, such as scripts, text files or  downloaded data can
easily be saved to a hard disk, a USB flash drive or even a floppy.

You can test whether you can burn an iso because you must do so to get
Oralux going. You can also test if your Bios would boot an installation CD,
because if Oralux boots, then an install CD should as well. You can run a
batch file on the CD under Windows to create a floppy disk which will boot
the CD if you don't have sighted help to poke around in your BIOS settings.

You can test whether software speech will work on your system because it
boots up talking. You can learn Unix commands without messing anything up.
You can try examining interesting output, such as the results of dmesg,
because Knoppix is so good at hardware detection. This helped me figure out
what modules my hardware needed.

Oralux also supports hardware synthesizers  so you can try out your ports.
It supports most network cards without you having to do anything. It has oss
and alsa drivers so you can hear the difference.  It has emacspeak so you
can start learning emacs. It has a good FAQ that answers many beginner
questions I had when getting started a couple of years ago.

Oralux supports a Braille display which is great if software speech fails to
work and you have a Braille display. Braille is also great for reading those
darned case-specific man pages. Speakup isn't part of Oralux but
what you learn using Oralux helps you install a better distro with speakup.
You will discover for example that software speech is sluggish, and that
some synthesizers will not work with some sound cards. For example on a
modern laptop, using the oss drivers, flite simply squeaks at me, whereas it
works beautifully on an older system. Using the alsa drivers it sounds
great, though a bit slow, and on the same older system, it just crashes the
entire thing.

You can try typical tasks like FTP fetching files, writing C code or shell
scripts, browsing the web or designing a web page using tools under Oralux
and you can borrow any PC, such as one in a school computer lab to do so.

Oralux isn't going to replace Fedora, but the idea is that you use it to get
started. Also if you have to work on a computer you don't own you can still
use Linux with access. I currently use it to fool with emacs as I'm more
proficient in vi. I use it to access machines in the computer lab where I
work that aren't running any access technology. I used it to recently rescue
a system I'd managed to really screw up. I used it to telnet to my tivo to
fix a problem that made it crash regularly, and I used it to telnet to
another machine where I'd accidently made it boot up no longer talking.
More advanced users have depended on Oralux as a launching pad to get a full
distro installed on a second machine. I have also used it to test if I'd
gotten ssh running correctly on another computer that can only run NetBSD.

I have also used Oralux with my machine that has only one serial port so I
could have both speech and Braille for troubleshooting a problem.

--Debee