Speakup and vinux

[Don Raikes]

Martin,

I have setup a dual-boot windows xp / vinux system on my laptop, so if you or anyone else would like help configuring that, I am happy to help.

My system beeps once when it gets to the boot menu, nad then if I arrow down to select windows, it beeps twice more. If I want linux, I can just let it timeout (approximately 5 seconds), and it then beeps and a short time after, I hear the Braille display drivers being loaded because it causes my alva satellite to sound some beeps and then speakup starts talking.

FYI: I have tried both the console-based and gnome-based Vinux systems and they are both very nice.  Gnome takes a little getting used to after working with windows for so long, but it is pretty good.

There are a few applications that still don't work that well with orca the gnome screenreader, but that list seems to be getting smaller all the time.

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin McCormick [mailto:martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 2:01 PM
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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