creating a speakup cli cd

[John G Heim]

I don't think I said I was ever against the use of oralux or vinus. I said projects tend to disappear when the person driving them stops working on them. But both oralux and vinux were great tools while they were supported. I haven't been following the current state of vinux but I've recommended it highly in the past. In fact, I would think it might be better to donate time to the vinux project than it is to start another live CD project. But as I said, I haven't kept up with vinux, it may already be a dead project for all I know.

I also didn't intend to say that people should not put out a customrescue  CD for the blind. In fact, I think I mentioned that I am toying with the diea of putting out a grml fork with the kernel patched to support hardware synths along with some other minor changes. 

Also, I don't see the debian live CD and grml as a competition. To me, that's a win-win situation. Although, I'll admit I don't understand why you think it's easier to install espeakup for the debian CD and merely pressing q on the grml CD. For one thing, you can't install a package without an internet connection. The debian CD does have the advantage of having a 2.6 kernel so more hardware synths are supported. On the other hand, you could just use an older version of grml to get a 2.6 kernel. That's not that different than using a debian squeeze CD which is going to be obsolete soon. My opinion is that both disks are good tools depending on what your needs are.
 
It is true that grml tries to stick as closely to standard tools and packages. I'm on the grml developers email list and I know this to be a fact. They did change their focus about two years ago to be a live rescue disk rather than a distro you might install on your hard disk. I can't address your specific example but it might be that they wrote that tool before the change in focus or maybe there was no equivalent standard tool at the time. 

On Feb 7, 2013, at 1:37 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:

> Yes, I've now read your wiki page.  I don't use GRML, but I found your page interesting.  I have an issue with having to press "q" every time you boot.  Inevitably, someone will forget to press it and wonder why your instructions won't work.  I don't think recent releases played the tones for me, but I think it was because my sound card was being muted.  This was a known bug in Debian which is now fixed.  With the Squeeze live CD, here would be a similar equivalent to your wiki page:
> 
> 1. Put the Debian Squeeze live CD in your computer and boot.  You should hear the CD drive spinning.  If not, you might need sighted help to change your BIOS settings.
> 
> 2. You'll land at a standard shell after about a minute.  To load hardware speech, enter the following:
> 
> sudo modprobe speakup_ltlk
> 
> Replace "ltlk" with the code for your synthesizer.
> 
> 3. Alternatively, if you know you'll be doing everything as root anyway:
> 
> sudo bash
> modprobe speakup_ltlk
> 
> It comes with an ssh server automatically, but the password for root won't be set and sshd will have to be started.  You can do both with speech after the appropriate module is loaded.
> 
> For Wheezy, the above instructions apply, but neither Squeeze nor Wheezy include the "espeak" and "espeakup" packages.  To work around this for now, do the following:
> 
> sudo modprobe speakup_soft
> sudo aptitude -y install espeakup
> 
> You might need to run "aptitude update" first.  You should eventually get speech, assuming speakup_soft is loaded.
> 
> I guess it's just me, but that seems easier than trying to get out of the quick help menu and hoping my sound card gets recognized.  Once the software speech packages are included on the live CD, it would be even simpler since a script could load speakup_soft and espeakup with one command.
> 
> On 2/6/2013 7:09 AM, John G. Heim wrote:
>> Have you seen the wiki entry I wrote on using the accessibility features of
>> grml? Here is the link again:
>> 
>> http://wiki.iavit.org/index.php/Accessing_grml
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