Some Questions About Linux And SpeakUp, part 1

[Gregory Nowak]

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Here is the first part of my reply, since I needed to split this up to
stay within the 5k list limit.

On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 08:02:20PM +0330, Parham wrote:
> VMWare is free? If yes, would you give me the address to download it? And is 
> it possible to run it under Windows XP?

Yes, vmware-server is free, as in no cost, and you can find it at
http://www.vmware.com. However, in order to get a license key for it,
you need to give away most of your personal info, and agree to let
them spam you, so, I'm not downloading it as long as that is how you
get a license key for it. Yes, vmware-server does run under windows
xp.

There are 3 free alternatives however that I'm aware of, and they
don't require that you give away your I.D., and your right not to
receive spam, in order to use them. The first is microsoft virtualpc:

http://www.microsoft.com/virtualpc/

, and it runs on winxp professional, as well as the business flavors
of vista, according to microsoft. Since they don't mention winxp home,
that either means they don't support running it on that, or they did
something to make sure you can't run it on that. It doesn't support
linux specifically as a guest os, which means that the virtualpc guest
additions aren't available for linux, which means I probably wouldn't
be running a gnu/linux guest in virtualpc for the long term. Also,
it's quite a chore to get the hostkey to wrestle keyboard control away from the
guest back to the host. The one thing in it's favor is that it does
support accessing physical serial ports on the host from the guest,
even through a usb to serial converter, since the guest sees that as a
standard com port. In fact, I am in the process of setting up a debian
virtual machine, to use on the go (assuming the host system will have
the vm software installed), and for when I eventually get a modern laptop, so
I can just run gnu/linux then as a vm on the laptop, without needing
to worry whether or not it has a serial port, whether or not all of
its hardware is supported by gnu/linux, and whether or not I'd be
losing my warranty should I choose to repartition the drive. 

The reason I'm mentioning this, is because I installed debian from the
netinst cd inside of virtualpc with a serial synth, booted the grml
livecd once I was done, and had software speech running in the new vm,
I imaged the system partition using partition image, created a new vm
in the next alternative I'm about to describe below, and restored my
imaged system to that vm in the below described virtual machine
software, and have now a debian vm with software speech running in my
favorite free vm software, described next.

The second alternative is actually one that Alex recommended on here
recently. It is virtualbox:

http://www.virtualbox.org

Virtualbox comes in 2 flavors. The first flavor is an open source
version, released under the gpl. They only provide the source for that
version, and instructions on how to build it. It's aimed primarily at
developers, so they don't provide ready-built binaries of the open
source version.

The second flavor is the virtualbox commercial version, which is
released under a proprietary license as binaries only, but the license
is very liberal and straight-forward in my opinion. The differences
between the 2 versions are that the commercial version supports using
usb devices attached to the host inside the guest, and the commercial
version also supports running the virtual machine as a headless
machine using rdp, the remote desktop protocol, which is the same one
that microsoft terminal services uses in xp professional, in 2003, and
I believe in vista. Virtualbox does run on all versions of windows
since and including 2000, and it runs on gnu/linux, mac osx, and soon
on os2 as well.

There are 2 down sides as of now to virtual box. The first is that the
gui interface is written in qt3, which means that it's tedious to work
with. I was able to get around that slightly by reclassing the custom
control in window-eyes as a multi-document window, but since the class
and window style are the same for all components, I wasn't able to
reclass everything to what it actually is.

Continued in part 2 of this post.

Greg


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