espeakup.iso install failure

[Kerry Hoath]

Excuse me for possibly missing the point here and I appologize if you have 
allready thought of the following.
I'm assuming you wish to install a release of Debian onto a box and you only 
have software speech or an ethernet card to hand for whatever reason.
Latest stable Debian has boot media with support for speakup and hardware 
speech, no use here.
How about booting grml 2008.11 with the options
grml swspeak=espeak

and then debootstrapping a release of Debian onto the blank hard disk? I 
have not tried this myself however documentation seems to indicate it is 
possible.
You could get the installed system configured for network card and telnet in 
afterwoods and install the speakup modules and parafinalia.

You could also ssh into the box if you pass the correct ssh options to grml 
and work on the box remotely bypassing the need for software speech.

I also use a ubuntu system installed to an extermal  USB hard disk assuming 
your bios can boot USB or you have a boot loader with initrd set up.

The external hard disk runs the Linux system then I can use it to mirror, 
copy, format and erase partitions on my netbooks, hp mininote, eeepc 701, 
msi wind etc.
It's also magic for running ntfs-clone to image up Linux partitions.
It is possible that you can also run Ubuntu or Debian off a flash drive, 
2-4gb drives are usually big enough although write speeds are low.
this gives you Linux in your pocket and you can install grml to a flash disk 
as well.

I personally know of no current method to install Debian off a cd with 
software speech; i'm happy to be corrected on this.
Ubuntu can be installed with gnome and orca; not really an option on older 
or less capable hardware.
I believe the stumbling block is the loading, detecting and configuration of 
soundcards at install time, something that can bring even the best system 
down if not done correctly.
If you think about it Windows doesn't even do this until well into the 
install.
There is a case however for supporting a subset of soundcards or for example 
a USB sound device during install; I guess nobody has worked on this as of 
yet. It would mean a whole slew of dependancies and extra non-standard crud 
in the boot media.
Certainly a win for accessability but a loose for space saving reasons and 
possible instability.

The only reason apple gets away with this is they make all their own 
hardware; they know what soundcards to expect, which quirks to work around 
and how to recover from grief 90% of the time.
Yes i've seen g4 macs where voiceover won't launch at install time so it's 
not perfect.

Just my thoughts.

Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jude DaShiell" <jdashiel at shellworld.net>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Sunday, May 03, 2009 8:58 AM
Subject: espeakup.iso install failure


>I tried installing espeakup.iso and came up with the same problem I had 
>with mini-beep.iso, no modules found for distribution being installed.  I 
>tried installing with testing; stable, and unstable and had identical 
>results.  I'm going to have to find an older ethernet card and install it 
>to make this work.  Fortunately I have something that's positively ancient 
>hopefully pci too but I'll have to check that.  This was also tried with 
>ftp.us.debian.com, so am pretty certain the installer didn't properly 
>detect the failure with the ethernet card and also failed to either detect 
>or take account of the missing release file. The other unfortunate thing 
>about squeeze for those of us with intel sound cards is that squeeze can't 
>detect them or configure them.  This was not the case with lenny before 
>sid.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>