Speakup and vinux

[Martin McCormick]

Hello and happy New Year.

	Over the New Year's weekend, I downloaded and installed
the middle-sized version of vinux which is a version of Debian
Linux which boots up speaking and uses speakup as the speech
engine. This is a game changer for me and I think it should be
one for a number of others who own middle-aged to slightly older
computers that are not ready for the attic or the recyclers yet,
but are not bleeding-edge dream machines with gigs of RAM and
terrabytes of disk storage.

	You can read about vinux at

http://vinux-development.blogspot.com/

	There is a minimal iso image, a mid-sized one and a set
of 4, I think, CDROM images for a complete Linux installation
from CD.

	I tried the vinux installation on 3 systems. One is a
Gateway system from 1995 or so. It only presently has 64 megs of
RAM and that is really not enough. The speech works, but
aptitude barfs every time you try to install anything and
complains about running out of memory. Also, there were numerous
errors during the installation stating that there was no space
left on the device. I believe that is probably the virtual disk
created from available RAM of which there is far too little.

	Amazingly, the speech is fine. The remedy is to find
some more memory and try the installation again as I don't know
what all didn't get installed.

	The second system was that laptop. It has finally met
its match. The installation went smoothly and it now has 6
virtual consoles that talk when you need them.

	Just for fun, I tried to add mplayer and mpg123. They
went right in and speechdispatcher and the other alsa services
all seem to play nicely together. You hear speakup mixed right
in with the music or whatever audio one is listening to and
neither seems to disrupt the other.

	I also tried recording with a microphone. I still may
not have amixer set right but the recordings are much better and
consistent each time. That laptop has no line input although
amixer reports a Line input. This system appears to be working
although I haven't tried a PCMCIA serial port yet.

	The third system is another oldie from around 2000 at
work. I had a terrible time formatting the hard drive for Linux
because it had had FreeBSD on it and I didn't know you can't
just format the drive with ext3 file systems. You start with a
ext2 and use makee2fs -j /PARTITIONNAME and things are much
better afterward.

	Now for the slightly bad news. When you install vinux,
you get a British keyboard. I am sure there are plenty of
British people who feel the same way when they get a US
keyboard. The British and US keyboards are mostly identical but
the differences can drive one crazy when you are used to one and
now confronted with the other.

	The shift of the number 2 gives you a double quotation
mark. The key that should send the \ gives you a number or
Pounds sign as in shift-3. The Caps-lock key does not announce
as it toggles and you soon discover that setting it involves the
normal speakup sequence of shift-capslock but clearing it
requires just a tap on the Caps-lock. Also, the Caps-lock on the
UK keyboard shifts numbers and punctuation marks as if one was
really holding down the Shift key. That's bad when you have
punctuations in a password.

	If any of you install vinux, you can temporarily get a
US keyboard by entering the following command after su'ing to
root:

loadkeys us

	Not only do you magically get an American keyboard map,
but the Caps-lock starts announcing its status each time you
change it and it also works the way we are used to seeing it
work.

	When you get vinux installed, the way to permanently
change to a US keyboard is complicated slightly by the fact that
the instructions do not work quite right.

	You are supposed to type install-keymap us and a new
boot-time keyboard map should be copied to
/etc/console-setup/boottime.kmap.gz or something close but it
doesn't happen. I discovered after some poking around that it
installs the keymap in to /etc/console for some reason. To fix
that, you must manually copy that file to /etc/console-setup/
and then it all works.

	I got in touch with the fellow who wrote the vinux
distribution and told him how much I appreciate the effort he
has made. As far as I am concerned, it has made a lot of
equipment that was gathering dust useful again. I can now turn
off a setup I have been using for 23 years which includes an
Echo P.C. synthesizer. It has worked well for all these years,
but it is time to modernize.

	Sorry for the length of this message, but I think vinux
adds more options to making Unix/Linux more accessible and that
is what it is all about.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group