General questions from someone who's never used Speakup...

[John Heim]

If you're going to be a linux sysadmin, you are going to need to use a linux 
screen reader. You can't do everything remotely. For instance, you can't fix 
networking problems remotely.

I have never heard of that DOS program you're talking about. But I use 
speakup every day. My job is to admin the servers at the University of 
Wisconsin Department of Mathematics. Most of the servers are rack mounted 
and (thank God) I haven't had to operate them at the console. But just this 
morning I had to work on a server that isn't rack mounted. I connected an 
external speech synth, logged in, started speakup, and did my thing.

The rack mounted machines are all administered via the serial port. If I 
ever have to admin one of them at the console, my plan is to go to the 
server room with a null modem cable and a laptop that is running speakup and 
then log in via kermit. But that's just a theory. I've never had to try it.

But I have done quite a bit of system admin on machines that do not have 
speakup installed. This I did with the afore mentioned laptop and kermit. So 
that works. Also, I've done about a bzillion linux installs via speakup.

Honestly, I use speakup every day. It may be possible to be a linux system 
admin without it but I wouldn't want to try it.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Homuth" <james at the-jdh.com>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 11:59 AM
Subject: Re: General questions from someone who's never used Speakup...


> I'm wondering, though, what kind of feedback overall I can expect
> from it. I'm giving serious thought to getting into system
> administration, yes, but if it's going to offer as much or, I guess,
> as little feedback as programs like asap for DOS have, then it
> probably isn't really worth my switching, and I'd likely be better
> off sticking to administering linux systems as best I can remotely,
> since I get more feedback that way. Also, how does it handle
> environments wherein the text is constantly changing? IE an active
> realtime communications medium. If I understand it correctly, it's
> designed to stop speaking when you start typing... is there perhaps a
> way that that can be changed, or at least temporarily disabled?
> Questions like that I'd rather have answered before I start looking
> for old computers to turn into experimental linux boxes.
>
> James
> At