Introducint myself to list members

[aerospace1028 at hotmail.com]

greetings Ahmed
I'm new to linux myself, but I'll try and point you to some places that might be of interest.  I'm not sure if anyone has replied to you off-list, so I'll try to start at the beginning.  

First, there are many distributions of linux available.  Some of the most common include; Open Solaris (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/), Fedora (http://fedoraproject.org/), Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/), and Open SuSE (http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org).  

As far as I know, all of these distributions that I have listed use what is called the "gnome desktop."  The gnome desktop is just a graphic desktop environment--sort of analogus to the Windows desktop.  Gnome includes it's own screen-reader called "orca" (http://live.gnome.org/Orca).  In my opinion, orca is highly functional and makes gnome-based linux distrobutions quite accessible.  At this point in time, you will want to avoid any distribution that uses "KDE" instead of gnome.  KDE is an alternate graphical desktop environment that is not yet compatible fully with AT-SPI (the linux accessibility protocol).

I'm new to speakup myself (I'm looking through the process to install speakup on my own machine), but from what i have found out, in most cases, you will need to install it after you get your specific linux distribution up and running.  There is one exception: it is possible to obtain Fedora with speakup pre-compiled (http://speakupmodified.org/).

You might want to check out Darragh's site (http://www.digitaldarragh.com/linux/showpage.asp?section=linux&category=accessibility&title=Linux%20Accessibility); he has made several audio tutorials concerning linux accessibility.  In particular, you can listen to a walk-through for installing Ubuntu and Open SuSE and get a handle on the process before doing it yourself.

One more thing to consider, I'm not sure about internationally but within the United States among universities Solaris is popular.  I use Ubuntu myself, but if you are going to be working with institutions that are running one version of Solaris or another, using Open Solaris might make transitioning your work from your personal machine to a university network more seamless.

I hope this is not over-whelming and helps get you started:-)
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