Re: New Member Intro, Installation Help
Hi Mario,
First some updates on where I'm going now. I followed this tutorial here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2016
and managed to get Debian installed all right, yahoo. I was initially a bit
lost regarding the lilo boot prompt but could seee even without
magnification that it was probably some text mode box with a few choices in
it. I read a bit about a Lilo howto and found out that if you hold down alt
when it loads Lilo, it will let you type in boot parameters and all.
Amazingly enough the serial console works great even after instalation, no
need to mess around with any config files. Now I'm planning to add X,
WIndowMaker, a graphical package installer tool and Mozilla. I'll try to set
up a couple of different resolutions so that I can have 320x240 style
magnification in X. It is big enough for me to read the text.
I'm still not sure if my ISA sound card, namely Sound Blaster AWE32, was
auto-detected and set up during the installation or not. How do I find this
out and can I use alsamixer to unmute channels and tweak the gain? I checked
that /dev/dsp exists as do dsp1, dsp2 and dsp3 oddly enough.
Also, how do I search by package name or description in apt-get without
actually installing a package?
Though this is not so urgent a problem, I think I'd like to move onto using
the 2.4 or even the 2.6 kernel at some point because of better performance.
I won't be posting about kernels here much as this is an accessibility list,
but would appreciate pointers to nice howtoes. I wonder if I can get
pre-compiled kernel binaries with apt-get.
IrcSpeak:
is essentially the same as the "speak" script for sirc I described above,
however, it is written for ERC, the Emacs IRC Client, and it utilizes
Emacspeak for speech output.
Thanks for the explanation. That sounds like a nice option. Though I'm not
terribly keen on using Emacs at least initially, I'll liekly be starting out
with a conventional screen reader such as Yasr or Screader.
http://delysid.org/programming.html (the project
list), although I haven't documented everything properly up there anyway.
I didn't check the complete project list yet but I read the page about
programming languages. I also started out at age 12, soon turning 21
actually, with DOs batches. Later on came Q-Basic and bits of C. I lost
interest for some time but during the few recent years have picked up basic
C; C plus plus and Java skills. I'm currently also playing around with Perl
and BF.
I am happy to hear this, since it was one of my primary motivations for
packaging this stuff in the first place.
Ah, I'm glad someone took the time. Installing X is a breeze, for instance.
I havne't installed any speech packages yet but will be doing that as soon
as I can confirm the sound is working. Umm howabout catting ASCIi text to
/dev/dsps does that produce noise similar to playing back Windows binaries
as raw PCM?
SuperCollider has no edit, compile, run cycle
It is a dynamic programming anguage in a sense.
I see what you mean and this realtime aspect sounds nice. A bit like
tweaking sound effect parameters in say Sound FOrge with real time
prevewing. Older versions had to slowly calculate the previews and could not
do them on the fly. I like to play live so this realtime attitude helps in
that regard as well.
write code which receives MIDI events, and does something
with them (like controlling the parameters of a running synth,
It's good to hear MIDI data can be processed, I reckon it would be very easy
to map nasty NRPN or sysex messages to controllers.
some piece of code, or by interfacing with MIDI, or with whatever
else you can think (and program) of/for.
Umm, I'm actually thinking of implementing a basic MIDI to CV converter in
software at some point. It could be used to control and tune synths that
rely on Moog-style control voltages for input. OF course I also need a piece
of hardware that generates certain CV based on what comes out of the
parallel port but I know one guy who can take care of the hardware side.
Maybe this would be easy to do in LInux, I was to originally write this in
Java as it supports MIDI and serial ports nowadays.
I haven't tried SuperCollider with Emacspeak yet. I am more of a primarily
braille user.
I can use braille too, but tend to rely on speech more.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and more:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila
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