Integrating Speakup/ESpeakup into Debian boot process

[Gregory Nowak]

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That's quite a rant there, (smile). I have the distinct feeling after
reading this that you're looking at things from the wrong perspective,
so let me try to address your points below in 2 parts.

On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 03:03:19PM -0700, Gaijin wrote:
> 	Sorry, I just can't see spending every waking moment learning
> how to keep Debian unstable/Sid working while I'm still playing catchup
> from when Woody had just been released, and I had just started learning
> Linux.

Why are you running Sid, where changes happen rapidly, and it all
isn't always expected to work like it's supposed to? My recommendation
would be that if someone wants to learn Debian, that person should
start from a stable distro, like Lenny, and go to testing/unstable
only once you're comfortable with the system and how it works, and are
prepared for things to break.

> A lot of things have happened since I was punching in monitor
> frequencies to get X11 working and looking for howtos on how to get the
> system to make a 56K call to my ISP.  It's like, "Oh! there's already a
> pon and poff script already on the system for this.  Wish I'd known that
> 6 months ago when I was tweaking settings in pppd.conf."

Since you didn't know how to get ppp going 6 months ago, I can only
assume that either this information wasn't given on the debian web
site 6 months ago, or that you simply didn't bother to look for the
information, choosing to instead do things the older, and harder
way. If you go to www.debian.org, go to support, go to documentation,
you'll see several links to extremely detailed (in my not so humble
opinion) documents. The most useful of these, I think, is the debian
reference guide, which will tell you more about Debian than you
probably will ever need, or want to know. Section 10.2.4 explains how
to get things going. Let's assume you couldn't find that section for
some reason. Another look through the reference guide table of
contents, draws my attention to section 3.8.6, entitled "Dialup PPP
configuration", which describes the basics of getting on-line with
dial-up, and points you to section 10.2.4 for more details. 

I'll grant that all of this info is irrelevant if you don't have the
ability to get on the web, either due to lack of accessibility, or
some other issues. That's however not Debian's short coming, they can
only put food on the table, they can't chew and swallow it for you too.

> 	Unless you already know exactly what you're doing and exactly
> where all the information is spread all across the internet, and are
> willing to spend every waking moment keeping track of all the changes, I
> still can't recommend Debian for new users.

As I already said, you don't need to look all across the internet in
the case of debian. Going to www.debian.org, will tell you all you
need/want to know. As for keeping track of changes, if you were
running stable, instead of unstable, there would be no need for you to
keep track of changes, unless it was when upgrading from one version
of Debian to another, which doesn't happen that often, (I.E. if I
recall correctly, something like 2 years passed between Etch, and Lenny).

> Your perspectives are
> coming from the top of the mountain, not the bottom. or from somewhere
> onn the slope where everyone else is.  You likely *already know* how to
> get out of trouble when something completely hoses the system, or you
> possess hardware like braille terminals that give you added ways to
> access the system.

Yes, you're right that I already know how to get out of trouble, if
something completely hoses the system. However, I wasn't born with
that knowledge, I had to read documentation, and ask for help, when
the documentation I was looking at, didn't provide the answers I
needed, as can be evidenced by this list's archives. You will find
there a good number of my posts, which I just smile and shrug when
looking at now, but which were burning, and serious questions for me
when I wrote them. Oh, and no, I don't have a braille terminal,
they're far too expensive. I do have a couple hardware synthesizers,
and I seem to recall you have a USB dectalk, which means that you also
have hardware to help you access the system, just like I do, though
none of my synths are a dectalk, but that's beside the point. Even if
you didn't have a hardware synth, software speech has come a very,
very long way since I first started using GNU/Linux, and there are
some posts in this list's archives from new users who started out with
software speech, so special hardware isn't strictly necessary to use
the system today.

Part 2 to follow.


Greg


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