gnupernicus questions

[Willem van der Walt]

Hi,

> Hi all,
> My name is Matthys Terblanche.  I recently decided to byte the bullet and get an old AMD 1.1 gHz up and running with linux.  I downloaded the full 2.3 gigs of Fedora with Speakup and installed using the BNS synth. Everything is running and working at this point.
> As far as I can gather, Speakup is a screen reader for
the text console environment?
Yes, and for a blind person, the text console is the
most accessible environment. One can do most things from there.

> What do I need to do to get Gnupernicus up and running?
Is it already on the fedora distribution cd's or do I need to download it?
It should be on the cds, but if I were you, rather go for Orca, the 
alternative to Gnopernicus.
The development on Gnopernicus has slowed down,
and there was an anouncement to the effect that the gnopernicus developers 
will join forces with the Orca developers to make Orca better.

Gnopernicus will be gently put to bed.
If you have done a "everything install" of Fedora, you likely have all you 
need to run Gnopernicus, or for that matter orca.  As none of the gui 
screenreaders is really usable for production use, I suggest that you get 
the very latest version of gnome-speech which contains a driver for 
speech-dispatcher.  That is another program you need to drive software 
speech for speakup.
Following this approach allows for simultanious use of speakup and 
orca/gnopernicus.  For software speech and speakup you also need 
speechd_up, a speakup client for speech-dispatcher.

   What software synth is worth while?
I suggest espeak as it now also contains an AFrikaans voice and is small, 
stable and has clear English.
get it from espeak.sourceforge.net.
You have some other options too, Festival was convensionally used for 
software speech, but it has a few hitches.
the other option is flite, or Festival light.  It is smaller and works ok, 
but as far as I am conserned, the speech is unclear.

  How do I activate Gnome when I finished installing Gnupernicus?
Two things, If you have followed the speakup instructions, you have 
changed the initdefault from 5 to 3 in /etc/inittab.
Fedora as far as I know, has gnome as the default desktop, so, once logged 
on as a normal user, not root, type startx. that is:
s t a r t x to start the gui.  If you have installed Orca as i would 
suggest, it should start speaking when x is started.
I see you are in za, we have a number of mailing lists here at the csir 
for disability related issues.  One of those is for technical issues.
You can join by sending email to blind-join at napsa.org.za.
You can also phone me on 012 8413996.
Regards, Willem

> Any help on this will be much appreciated.
> Thanks,
> Matthys

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