Thoughts on newbies getting stuck

[hank smith]

how do you use oralux to get linux installed on a second machine?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Debee Norling" <debee at jfcl.com>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 10:52 PM
Subject: Thoughts on newbies getting stuck


> 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
>
>
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