vinux Distribution

Martin McCormick martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu
Sun Jan 3 20:28:23 GMT 2010


Hellow, list;

	I installed vinux which is a version of Debian Linux
that is optimized for blind and visually-impaired users so it
comes up speaking. This is a little gem. As the owner of several
still-serviceable but older computers, vinux gives new life to them.

	I tried the ubuntu-live CD on a Dell laptop dating back
to 2003. It contains 256 megs of RAM but still died due to lack
of RAM.

	The "vinux" live CD is a talking console using speakup
and appears to be a one-man effort.

http://vinux-development.blogspot.com/

	I mention it on this list because I saw a previous
posting from somebody who was trying to find a mailing list for
vinux.

	We need something like this in a main distribution
because not every system in the real world is cutting-edge
technology nor is it ready for the recyclers either.

	When I put vinux on the laptop, it simply started to
work. The only issues are that you must do something about the
keyboard if you live in the United States. You get a UK keyboard
by default. All the letters and numbers are where you expect
them, but try typing in a Email address or redirecting a Unix
command via the pipe symbol and you get a few surprises. The @
sign and double-quote keys are swapped and several others are
not where you are used to finding them.

	The Caps-lock key does not announce its status but the
high pitch of the echoed key strokes lets you know after the
fact, and so on.

	The loadkeys us commands fixes that and, strangely
enough, the Caps-lock announces its status and toggles normally
when shifted which is a normal behavior under speakup.

	The fun starts when trying to make the US keyboard the
default at boot time. You should be able to run

install-keymap us

to replace the default boot-time keymap. It doesn't work and an
exhaustive trouble-shooting session turned up that under vinux,
install-keymap was putting the new map in /etc/console when it
should have put it in /etc/console-setup. Someone simply goofed.

	After fixing the keyboard, the rest is more than I ever
hoped for. The speech dispatcher and the audio devices for
playing and recording sound peacefully coexist. From a previous
Oralux distribution on that same laptop, I know that sound
barely worked at all. You could get speech but speech and
anything else usually worked poorly or not at all and failed in
ways that I am sure were interrupt and contingency-related. As a
final blow, the version of speakup that was part of Oralux was
one of the older versions that went in to painfully-slow
spelling mode  when one tried to use a RS-232 serial converter
on the USB port.

	I haven't tried a serial port under vinux, but
everything else  actually works as expected.

	I really think separate special distributions are not
the best answer because, when the developer moves on or passes
on, the project dies and we are back to trying to hammer square
pegs in to roud holes or whatever analogy you like to describe
the frustration of trying to mate pieces that don't fit the.

	The accessibility project for orca and ubuntu is nothing
short of amazing. If we could only have a way of starting the
live CD in vinux mode so that vinux grows along with the main
distribution, we would have it made in the shade.

	The author of vinux actually describes such a hope in
the blog.

	As a final thought, I also installed vinux on a
1995-vintage Gateway system with only 64 megs of RAM but a
400-MHZ processor. The speech works flawlessly but 64 megs  is
just not enough to let aptitude work correctly so I will have to
add at least 64 more megs and then reinstall vinux as the
virtual disk wasn't big enough to let the installation process
work properly. I am really surprised it works at all.

	Sorry for the length of this message but I needed to
explain why this is a very important and useful development.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group



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