[Fwd: Re: Adding speech to IFL]

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

Yes, I realize that this is not open source software and will turn off 
many of you, but it is a good disk imaging and backup program and I 
highly recommend it.  It is rare that a commercial company will go out 
of their way to support the blind community and especially a relatively 
small project like Speakup, so I would encourage you to please take a 
look at this.  If there are free software alternatives that work as well 
and have the current Speakup from git built-in, I'm certainly not aware 
of them.  If you register, I think you get free upgrades for life but 
you would need to check the site.  They also offer Image for DOS and 
Windows, both of which are very accessible.  I find their software far 
better and easier to work with than Ghost which I couldn't use at all.  
I suppose one could use dd which is part of coreutils, but it doesn't 
offer compression and would still require a live or rescue CD to use 
outside the boot drive.



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: Adding speech to IFL
Date: 	Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:52:02 -0400
From: 	TeraByte Support (TP) <tomp at terabyteunlimited.com>
Organization: 	TeraByte Unlimited
To: 	Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net>
References: 	<49B66FF4.90107 at optonline.net> 
<49B693E1.9060406 at terabyteunlimited.com> <49B7C966.1010302 at baechler.net>



Hi Tony,

I got delayed by other issues yesterday, but I'm now making the test
copy with Speakup 3.0.3 available at the following link:
http://tpdirect.homeip.net:1081/ifl-speakup-unreg.zip

The zip file there includes the iflnet.iso file, a readme file, and the
spkguide.txt file that comes with Speakup. The readme file hopefully
explains the rest well enough for users to try it.

Please note that this ISO file contains the trial (unregistered) version
of IFL 2.26. I asked, but am not able to provide the registered version
for this test. Hopefully, that will be OK.

I will keep the test version available at that link for as long as
necessary - or at least a week or so at any rate.

Thanks again for the response, and of course any feedback is very much
welcome. I put my email address in the readme file for users to send
feedback ( tomp at terabyteunlimited.com )

Regards,

-- 
Tom Pfeifer
TeraByte Consultant


Tony Baechler wrote:
> Yes, I'm still very interested!  With the git versions of Speakup, it
> doesn't matter as much if it is compiled as modules or not as it
> apparently doesn't speak every boot message anyway.  The idea behind
> compiling it into the kernel was to keep the size down and to have
> access to all boot messages, but anything is better than nothing. 
> Modules would be fine and probably makes more sense.  Yes, I would like
> to download and try the test image.  I realize that IFL isn't free
> software, but is there any way the rest of the Speakup community could
> test this?  That would test a lot more hardware combinations and
> different synthesizers than I have available here.
> 
> TeraByte Support (TP) wrote:
>> Hi Tony,
>>
>> A while ago, you contacted us about adding speakup to the IFL boot disk.
>>
>> I realize this was over a year ago, but if you are still interested, I
>> can make a test copy of the IFL boot disk ISO file (iflnet.iso)
>> available for download within the next day or so.
>>
>> It will have speakup (version 3.0.3) compiled directly into the kernel,
>> which you indicated was preferable to using modules. Any feedback you
>> could give us would be extremely helpful.
>>
>> Thanks and regards,
>>
>>