[DNG] Devuan Minimal Live Images -- new version

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi KatolaZ and the speakup list,
KatolaZ, I'm sending a cc to the speakup list, which is full of blind
GNU/Linux speakup user's. I have my own thoughts on your comments
below, but my preferences aren't everyone else's. So, I think it's a
really good idea to give you more feedback at this point in our
discussion. Fellow speakup listers, the images that KatolaZ is
working on can be found at:

<http://devuan.kalos.mine.nu>

As I type this, we have a beep at the isolinux boot prompt, which
sounds to me like three beeps. You can either press enter here, or
wait a few seconds more. If you are booting from a burned cd, it will
spin for a bit. If you are booting some other way, wait maybe three
minutes at most, probably less. Either way, then type "root", and
"toor" as the password to login. Then to start speakup, type:

modprobe speakup_soft

followed by

service espeakup start

You should then hopefully get software speech. The images also include
brltty, which is started by default, and configured for a usb
display. Since brltty and speakup both want to use the numpad, you
will have to do service brltty stop to stop brltty, so speakup can
control the numpad. The alternative is to use speakup's laptop layout,
which does work just fine. The images include yasr as well, which I
haven't tested yet.

Comments are inline.


On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 06:54:09AM +0100, KatolaZ wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 03:33:05PM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> > Hi again,
> > as far as getting agetty to play ctrl+g ... I don't know of a way to
> > do that. You can however simply edit /etc/issue, and put a ctrl+g into
> > that. The way I do this in vi is to do vi /etc/issue.
> > Then I do "i" to insert at the beginning, and then I do ctrl+v ctrl+g
> > to insert a ctrl+g into the file. Then I just do esc, followed by
> > ":wq" to save the file.
> > 
> 
> Hi Greg,
> 
> thanks you very much for your reply. I am actually trying to find a
> solution that is somehow configurable, but maybe that just putting a
> ^G in issue is just fine.
> 
> I have also scripted a simple daemon that "beeps" every second during
> the boot, and emits a certain beep sequence when the boot is complete
> (basically, when getty has been spawned). I will now test it and if
> everything works fine I will include it in the next release.

Ok, thanks. I have tested so far with the
Devuan_1.0_Jessie-Beta_minimal-live_amd64-20160523_0028.iso image. At
the boot prompt, there are what seem to be three beeps one after the
other. I'm personally think that's probably longer than it needs to
be. I would say that a single beep is good enough. I'm also not sure
that progress during boot is necessary. I think that a beep at the
isolinux boot prompt, and another at the login prompt would be enough,
but that's just my personal opinion, others might find progress beeps
useful. I don't think such a a thing has been tried on a livecd before.

> 
> I was also thinking of "marking" the bootloader entries with beeps,
> but I don'w know what is the best way to do that. Basically, at the
> moment we have a single beep in each of the "bootable" entries. Maybe
> it might be useful to have 1 beep for the first entry, 2 for the
> second one, and so on? I am not sure though, since we also have in the
> boot menu two or three "special" entries (one is memtest, the other is
> a call to the chainloader, to boot whatever is found in the first
> disk), which should be somehow marked differently.
> 

I have always found it sufficient to know what was in
the boot menu, and to count arrow key presses to get what I wanted to
get to. Having different beeps for each boot entry is another concept
which I don't think has been tried before. I'm not sure
what the majority of blind
users would prefer. Perhaps you will get some feedback here.

> I would appreciate your take on this aspect. I was thinking to have
> something like:
> 
> 1) a single beep for each "normal" boot entry
> 
> 2) two beeps for the special "memtest" entry
> 
> 3) three beeps for the chainloader
> 
> A visually impaired user might just scroll through the first four
> options (a single beep for each line), then bump into the memtest (two
> beeps), then find the chainloader options (three beeps), then come
> back to the first bootable option (one beep)

That sounds reasonable to me.

> 
> Thanks again for your feedback, which is very much appreciated.

Thanks again for your work.

Greg


> 
> HND
> 
> KatolaZ
> 
> -- 
> [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
> [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ]
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> [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ]
> 

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