Some Questions About Linux And SpeakUp

Michael Whapples mwhapples at aim.com
Sun Jul 8 19:58:25 EDT 2007


In text consoles you can get a list of possibilities of completions by
pressing the tab key. So as an example, if I wanted a list of all
commands beginning with speech I would type speech at the command prompt
and then press tab and on this system it completes it to
speech-dispatcher (as speech-dispatcher is the only command starting
with speech I have installed). If there is more than one command, the
system may beep when you press tab, pressing tab again will bring up a
list, eg. if I were to enter pin at the command prompt and press tab the
system beeps (requires system speaker to be enabled), and then when I
press tab again I get a list like
"ping   ping6   pinky"
This also works for filenames and directories.

It might be worth you finding some HowTos for Linux to find the basic
commands, the dos to unix HowTo is a good one for a windows or dos user
coming to linux (it only really explains the very basics, but does draw
comparisons to the Ms way). There are others for people beginning with
Linux, or ones on specific topics (eg. networking, email, etc).
Unfortunately I don't have a list of web addresses to hand for this, but
here google is a friend, and www.google.com/linux is specific to linux.

To explain what was going on when you entered firefox in the text
console, firefox is a GUI app, and as the GUI wasn't running it couldn't
find the GUI display for it to use, hence its failure to load.

Here is a short list of text console apps, not complete, but a starting
point. I haven't used GRML so don't know if these are included in GRML
by default.
nano or pico - a basic text editor
vi or vim - more text editors, different style to nano or pico, more
advanced
ne - again another text editor, advanced
cone, pine, mutt or elm - email clients
lynx - a basic web browser
links or elinks - more advanced web browsers
emacs or emacspeak - environment based around a advanced text editor,
but extended to much more including email and web browsing
ftp - a ftp client
man - view software manual pages
info - view software info pages
mplayer - some argue the player for nearly all formats
sox - swiss army knife of sound processing
aptitude - a package management system generally used in debian based
systems

Package management systems are useful starting points for finding out
about the software available.

From
Michael Whapples






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