A couple of uses for vmware: a way to get speakup in your Mac terminal instead of voiceover

[jeremy]

That's pretty creative. I'd always assumed that voiceover would work 
well in the terminal wen I decided to get a mac but was pleasantly 
disappointed. Using linux in a virtual machine is something I'd never 
have thought of.
Pretty neat.
On 8/22/2011 12:33 PM, Cheryl Ann Homiak wrote:
>
> Hi all.
>
> Since brltty is working well for me on this vmware fusion installation 
> (it didn't a couple of years ago) I realized that I could ssh into my 
> Mac with braille in the terminal which could eliminate the need to use 
> the Mac terminal with brltty or voiceover; in fact, I don't actually 
> even have to open terminal on the Mac. This led me to start thinking 
> about a voiceoveron podbean podcast recently lamenting the limited 
> usability of the Mac terminal with voiceover as compared to speakup on 
> linux. Suddenly I realized the solution to that problem really is 
> relatively simple. Of course you can ssh into a Mac using speakup for 
> speech but what if you don't have both a linux machine and a Mac or 
> what if you don't want to have to be running both machines all the 
> time? You can set up a virtual machine on the mac (I used Arch), ssh 
> into the mac, and do anything in the Mac terminal that you want to do 
> with full use of speakup. I just did this as a trial to update my 
> subversion install of brltty on my Mac. I'm using a full usb Apple 
> keyboard that has a numeric keypad. Voiceover of course didn't talk 
> during the svn procedure at all, at least not related to that 
> activity. I was able to stop speech with the option key and use the 
> numeric keypad to check the output. In short, it worked just as if I 
> had somehow managed to install speakup on my mac for use in Terminal! 
> Of course, if you have a vmware installation, you may not use Terminal 
> on the Mac as much anyway but there still may be programs you want to 
> compile or tasks you want to run on the Mac using terminal, plus you 
> can have a vmware installation of linux plus the use of Macports 
> and/or Fink along with the tools already present in the Mac's terminal 
> by default and manage all of these with speakup and/or brltty. I 
> should mention that if you are using a laptop keyboard or other 
> keyboard without a numeric keypad, this may present challenges but it 
> works perfectly with a full keyboard. Probably other people are 
> already doing this but this benefit had never really occurred to me 
> until now. Also, I was having trouble with using speakup because my 
> vmware machine's volume was much lower than my voiceover volume and I 
> didn't want to turn down voiceover; I had heard there was a volume 
> problem with vmware fusion but just to check I ran alsamixer and was 
> able to raise the volume to a very good level without affecting the 
> voiceover volume. so now I guess you could say I have speakup on the Mac!
>
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