This is the faq for blinux-list. If there's a question that you think should be on here, or if you want to add something in or correct something, send me some email. You can find the latest version of this faq at http://www.wpi.edu/~mgorse/blinux-faq.html.
A: Blinux-list is a list intended for discussion of Linux usage as it relates to the blind and visually impaired community, maintained by Hans Zoebelein. Blinux-list is not intended as a place to get answered for general Linux questions; there are plenty of resources available on the net for this. Such questions are off-topic, as are advertisements.
a: Linux-l@mana.landofhaze.com (mail listserv@mana.landofhaze.com and type subscribe linux-l to subscribe) and linux-newbie@vger.rutgers.edu (mail majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu and type subscribe linux-newbie to join) are two general-purpose mailing lists. Comp.os.linux.setup and comp.os.linux.hardware are good newsgroups to try. If you are wondering how to set something up under Linux, there may be a HOWTO that explains it (see below).
A: There is no single answer to this question, any more than there is a single choice for a sighted person. Different people prefer different distributions, but the distribution that you choose does not restrict the software that you can run, so each is more or less equally accessible. Some distributions may be easier than others to install without sighted assistance by using a serial terminal; Slackware can be installed in this way (see the Emacspeak howto), but this should not be the only factor that you use in deciding on a distribution, if possible. The Distribution howto may be worth reading. You may want to buy a Linux cd, especially if you don't have a fast internet connection, but all distributions are available for download at different places depending on which one you use.
A: It depends on the distribution you use. If you have a second computer or other device that you can use as a terminal, you might be able to install over your computer's serial port. Slackware can be installed in this way. With RedHat and derivatives (eg Mandrake), you can use kickstart to automate an install, so the details can be set up within windows or the like, and a custom boot disk will set up RedHat to the users specification. It can even take RPMs from an FTP site, so for example, the Festival synth can be set up at install time. --Jimmy O'Regan Speak-up may also be useful for doing installs.
A: Linux and Dos are completely different operating systems and Linux does not natively run Dos software. If you have another system that you can use as a terminal, one option would be to hook it up to your Linux box and access Linux through your terminal. This setup has the advantage that you can continue to use your existing screen reader, and may be a good option while you're getting started. . A variation on this technique would be to network your systems together. The Emacspeak howto (which I would recommend reading) has some information on using a terminal. Brltty allows braille displays to work in the console and supports a variety of devices; it has a web page at http://www.cam.org/~nico/brltty/ (the brltty page has a list of supported braille displays). There are also several programs for providing speech that are in various stages of development. Emacspeak is the most developed of these and is an advanced audio system that runs under Emacs, adding speech to all of Emacs's features. If you are going to use emacspeak, you should subscribe to its mailing list (emacspeak@cs.vassar.edu) by sending mail to emacspeak-request@cs.vassar.edu. Screader, svlpro), and Speak-up are more general-purpose screen readers but are newer and still being developed.
A: Emacs is an editor but it is a powerful program capable of doing many other things as well. Add-ons have been developed for it to allow the user to read email and browse the web, for example. Emacs also allows the user to escape to a shell, and Emacspeak may thus be used to give speech output to programs that are not written as Emacs modules.
Different screen readers support different synthesizers. Emacspeak includes a server for DEC-Talk synthesizers, but Jim Vanzandt has written servers for the Doubletalk / Litetalk, Braille 'n Speak / BrailleLite / Type 'n Speak, Accent, and Apollo 2 synthesizers. Bart Bunting has also written an Emacspeak server for Mbrola which can be used to get speech out of an ordinary sound card. [tbd - I don't know how this works since I haven't got around to trying it; if one of you has used it, I'd like to know how stable it is.] Svlpro supports the Echo, DEC-Talk, Accent, Speak-out, Braille 'n speak, Apollo, and Artic Transport. The Linux kernel includes a driver for the Doubletalk, and a driver for the DEC-Talk PC is available. Other internal synthesizers will probably not work. In particular, it would be difficult to write a driver for the Sounding Board since it would also be necessary to write text-to-speech software for the card since it only knows how to make utterances, and GW Micro will not release specifications for it.
A: There is a whole library of documentation, including whole books, available at many ftp and web sites, and their mirrors, in multiple formats, including ascii text. These are products of the "LDP" (Linux Documentation Project), which is mirrored from metalab.unc.edu (formerly known as sunsite). Good starting places for web based documentation are www.linuxnow.com and www.linuxresources.com.
If a very cheap CD library is desired instead, go to one of the cheap Linux CD distributors (see the question on cheap cdroms). For example, Cheapbytes puts a snapshot of much of the Linux Documentation Project archives on each CD, in the "doc" directory (actually, this is fairly traditional for linux CD's, no matter where you buy them).
Don't overlook the archives for blinux and leb.net, etc, from the end of the blinux mailing list messages:
Blinux software archive at ftp://leb.net/pub/blinuxSee also the Reading-List HOWTO, which references many of the resources by name, that you will find in the places mentioned above.
Orielly also publishes books on a wide variety of computer-related topics, and their books are available from Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic in audio form or as html or sgml documents.
Once you have access to an installed Linux system, you should be able to access lots of documentation in the /usr/doc directory and it's subdirectories, including just about everything from the Linux Documentation Project, if it was selected for installation, or installed later. There is a whole beginners book about Linux, in HTML, for instance. These same documents are all available from the ftp mirrors mentioned above, and from many linux web sites.
There is a text based web browser called "lynx" (type "lynx" at the command prompt), that is set up with a default opening page in RedHat installations, with links to just about all the documentation you could ever want, much if it on your local hard disk (other distributions probably have a similar default page). -- L. C. Robinson
A: It should be readable with a web browser, like the textmode "lynx" browser. Lynx is part of linux, but a DOS version is available: check at http://lynx.browser.org/ -- L. C. Robinson
[Should there be a specific download link here? What if it changes?]A. Heh, heh. Treat it as a resource. Look up what you need, when you need it. No one learns it all: most only need a small part of it. There are very few questions that can't be answered this way. There are some great searching utilities that can help in accessing this stuff: see, for instance, www.htdig.org, or use the search engines on the LDP web sites.
Of course, you'll want to survey it, look at the indexes, etc, so you'll know what's available.
A very good starting point is Matt Welsh's excellent "Linux Installation and Getting Started" guide. -- L. C. Robinson
Hopefully, your linux distribution has set up lynx with a default page that will bring a lot of the ldp stuff to you in a convenient way (RedHat does this).
Be sure to read the Emacspeak HOWTO and Access HOWTO right away. All HOWTOs are available via ftp in text form from metalab.unc.edu in /pub/Linux/doc/HOWTO.--L. C. Robinson
A: At present, it's not too practical, unless modified somehow, to install eyes free. Perhaps you get someone to tell you what's on the screen during the installation.
Advanced unix users might be able to use RedHat's kickstart procedure (see www.redhat.com, or the Kickstart HOWTO) to prepare an automatic, eyes free installation. If you are a novice, forget I mentioned it.
A: Well, of course there will always be drawing and graphical stuff, picture viewers, etc, that can't be accessed this way. But Linux has hundreds of utilities and programs in text mode that provide almost any kind of functionality that you might care about, usually in a better native format than their graphical counterparts, from the standpoint of a blind user, and often for others as well. These text mode applications are often superior, from a productivity and usablity standpoint, for ANY user, though the learning curve may be higher. These are accessible from within Emacspeak. --L. C. Robinson
A: Generally you would not want to do that. Native text utilities and applications will usually work better: these are accessible through emacspeak. Linux, like other Unix-based operating systems and unlike MS Windows, does not integrate a gui into the kernel. Many of the graphical programs that run under Linux are actually either front ends to text-based utilities, or programs which do things which can be done using text-based utilities. Since X is merely a set of applications which run on top of Linux, the text-based interface will always be available, as will applications that run in text mode. --L. C. Robinson
Q. Is anyone working on X-Windows screen reading capability?
A. Yes. Don't hold your breath, though. Much of the X stuff will never work well this way. There has been some discussion here of the superior possibilies for the new Gnome desktop (see the archives for details). The really important thing to understand, is that you have very little reason to be concerned about the GUI stuff, because of the rich functionality available in text mode. Also, Brian Selden is working on porting Ultrasonix to Linux. Ultrasonix is a screen access package for X that was originally developed for Sun SPARCstations running Solaris; see http://www.henge.com/~brian/ultralin.html for info.
If I were a new, blind user, I would probably get sgmltools (which was developed for the linux documentation project -- see www.sgmltools.org), and use that. I have Word Perfect for Linux, the server edition (which has the added capability of working on text based serial terminals). I do NOT recommend it. For people who need the proprietary MS-Word format to send documents to others, I would recommend using sgmltools to produce HTML format, and ask them to just use the HTML input capability of their proprietary word processor to convert or read it. Writing in a macro or formatter language (linux has several of these) has a more steep learning curve, but has been shown by studies to be far more efficient than WYSIWYG solutions, even in the sighted world.
A. First make sure you are running an up to date version of both Linux and emacspeak, and anything else you need. Lots of problems disappear just by running recent software in the Linux world, as improvements are extremely rapid. You can get recent CD versions for only about $7.00 from multiple vendors, as mentioned elsewhere in this FAQ, so there's no reason to fool with old versions.
When you post questions like this, make sure you specify exactly what software and hardware you are running, including your synth or braille display: if you do this, it's very likely that someone can tell you precisely what to put in your config files so that things will work. If the information is too vague, most people will just ignore your plea for help.
A: Because there are many very cheap CD distributors, it may not be necessary to guess at what distribution would be best for you. One can affordably try a variety of candidates. These sell for about $2.00 per CD (plus shipping and handling, about $5). Popular ones currently include: RedHat, Caldera, and SuSe, maybe Mandrake, which is an enhanced RedHat, Slackware (maybe easier to install eyes free, depending on hardware, but a pain to upgrade, etc), and Debian (the largest, most progams/packages, with the "alien" conversion utility, which allows borrowing packages from other distributions, but hard to install, for newbies).
Cheap CDs can be found at www.linuxcentral.com, www.lsl.com, www.linuxmall.com, and www.cheapbytes.com: more are appearing all the time. For a blind user, these are just as good as the $49.00 "boxed sets" from distributors like Redhat and Caldera: the main advantage of the later is that they include a paper manual and installation support, which can be had for free on the internet. The RedHat installation manual is available in electronic format, right on the CD (in HTML format), and on the web: others may be as well. --L. C. Robinson
A: Get an .xbm graphic made of the cursor at a usable size, and also a corresponding mask for the transparent bits of the cursor - black becomes transparent and white is solid if I recall correctly, I might be wrong. (I got a friend to do this for me.) Then I added to my .xsession:
xsetroot -cursor .cursor.xbm .cursormsk.xbm where .cursor.xbm was the image of the cursor and .cursormsk.xbm is the mask. - Andrew Devenish-MearesYou may also want to look at the X-Big-Cursor mini-howto. --L. C. Robinson
Isn't it easier to configure X to use, say, a 320x240 physical resolution and a 1024x768 virtual one? Then you can just shift the virtual screen in the physical one by pushing with the mouse on the sides. I run at 1024x768, and when I switch to a 640x480 physical screen it looks already decently magnificated.
For the console, I'd use SVGATextMode. The distribution already includes some "bigfont" modes: 50x15, 40x15, 40x12. This is not real magnification, just using a small terminal on a big screen. --Alessandro Rubini
For the Linux console you can run SVGATextMode, which should be included in most distributions; for Xterm use "control-mouse-1" (control key and right mouse button at the same time) to be offered a small font-changing menu. Unfortunately, SVGATextMode is not completely trivial to setup and the xterm menu is written in its default (small) font. --mgorse@wpi.edu>>