Speakup and vinux

[Øyvind Lode]

If you decide to install, backup the MBR (which now stores the windows boot
loader) before installing.
If you do a mistake with grub you can just restore the MBR and Windows will
boot as normal again.

Use dd to backup:

# dd if=/dev/sda of=windows-mbr.img bs=512 count=1

If you need to restore:
# dd if=windows-mbr.img of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

When restoring the MBR be sure that you type the command correctly and make
sure you don't accidently use a different file.
If you accidently dd with a file not containing a MBR, dd will just write
512 blocks from that file to the MBR on the harddrive...
That will efficiently destroy the MBR.

Also be sure to use the proper device for your HD.
/dev/sda may not be the correct one on your system.
Most likely /dev/hda if it's an old IDE disk.



-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of Martin McCormick
Sent: 5. januar 2010 22:01
To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.
Subject: Re: Speakup and vinux 

	It should load just fine as the operating system with speakup
appears to take up a couple of gigabytes. The middle-sized ISO image is
around 400 megabytes and gives you enough to get started. I remember the
painful feeling when I first started using Unix in 1989. It is easy to
forget things that now seem second nature but were once show stoppers.

	If you are familiar with Linux, vinux is standard Debian Linux with
speech on the console. If you are new to Unix, find a friend who knows more
than you do to at least help you get started. Remember that if you are not
root, you can't hurt much except for deleting your own files. There is no
undelete that works well as Unix systems are always doing something with
files and sectors that you don't need any more are marked as free and the OS
may just snap them right up a second later and turn them in to syslog or
something else.

	Unix and all its various flavors like Sunos, AIX and FreeBSD to name
a few, don't require defragmentation of the hard drive as they constantly
act like a very thorough file clerk in an office who can't stand to see
disorder so they are always looking for pieces of files and making sure they
all fit together in contiguous blocks so that the OS doesn't have to waste
time to gather them from here and there. In other words, when you rm a file,
it is often-times gone for good for all practical purposes.

	The nice thing about a live CD is that you do not have to write so
much as one byte to your hard drive in order to test it out. Burn the iso
image to a CDROM and boot from that. As long as you don't run the installer,
you aren't going to modify your present setup. You will hear it start to
talk some time after the boot process starts and you will get a shell just
as if you were logged in.

	Be really careful if you decide to install it as you don't want to
destroy your Windows partitions. You can set it up so that you have a short
time to decide whether you want to boot Windows or Linux. One thing to watch
out for is that the boot sector for Linux mustn't clobber the Windows boot
sector. It does sometimes happen. I haven't ever set up a multiple-boot
system so I can't help much there

	The best of luck as you learn about vinux.

Martin McCormick
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