Speakup and vinux

[Janitha Rukmal]

Hi Martin,
I  was looking for a good linux distribution just like Vinux. I'm from a 
3rd world country & so can't afford to move on to some high-end  ICor 7 
machine. According to your detailed explanation I understand that it 
will work fine with my Compaq Amada E500 Notebook that has a Pentium 3 
processor, 256 mb ram and 20 Gb harddisk a part of which has been 
dedicated to Windows OS cause it's very hard to survive in Sri Lanka 
without at least a pirate copy of windows installed on a computer.
So, my windows partition has occupied nearly 12 out of 20 Gb I've got in 
my notebook. What I would like to know is whether it's possible or not 
for me to go ahead with Vinux with the resources and Harddisk space my 
notebook possesses.

I want to know this in advance cause my ISP is also yearning to cut off 
a big chunk when I'm downloading something pretty big as this and I want 
to save it if this distribution is also not going to work for me.

Many thanks in advance
With best wishes for a happy, prosperous, peaceful and victorious year 2010!
Janitha Rukmal

On 1/5/2010 11:18 PM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 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
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>