Introducint myself to list members

[Gregory Nowak]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 03:50:11PM -0500, aerospace1028 at hotmail.com wrote:
> 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).  

A couple more are slackware http://www.slackware.com, and debian
http://www.debian.org.
As far as I know, open Solaris isn't based on linux. The name suggests
that it is an open variant of Sun's os, which is in the unix family,
and not in the linux family. I'll admit I don't know much about Sunos,
so I do stand to be corrected. What this means to you, is that you
will not be able to use speakup under open solaris.

> 
> 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).

Note that slackware doesn't come with gnome. So, if you want to use
gnome, and don't want to have to install it separately, slackware is
probably not for you.

> 
> 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/).

This is not strictly correct, Slackware was the first distribution to
include speakup in the official install media, and it still does, as
far as I know. From what I've read on this list, it looks like debian
lenny will include speakup in the official netinst iso image. Also, as
far as I remember, ubuntu used to come with speakup, but doesn't
anymore, as far as I know.

Greg

- -- 
web site: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org
gpg public key: http://www.romuald.net.eu.org/pubkey.asc
skype: gregn1
(authorization required, add me to your contacts list first)

- --
Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEARECAAYFAkkh4LcACgkQ7s9z/XlyUyBqDQCglBoWdTM6U6Y8f9fgQ5g+Ydip
5B0AnjRLkq253JTPPUPyiyFwIxJIB/C5
=LWI5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----