OS and bootable pen drive?

[Tim Chase]

Rob Harris wrote:
> Questions:

I'll try to answer the ones I know

> 1, does anyone know anything about this version of Linux 

My understanding is that it's a Red-Hat derivative, so my 
assumption would be that any administration would be similar 
using rpm/yum.  There are lots of tutorials on using these tools.

> know if it would take many or any of the speech screen reader
> solutions  for more main stream Linux?

thus, pretty much any package you can install on Red Hat should 
be installable on Linpus.  So you could use brltty, speechd, 
festival, flite, yasr, emacspeak, speakup, screader, orca, etc.

> 2, could someone list the various mainstream  speech screen
> reader solutions for Linux these days, the environments they
> give access to and their system or peripheral requirements?

speechd/flite/festival provide speech output.  My understanding 
is that brltty can route to a either a speech-output, or to a 
braille terminal.  For GUI access, Orca is currently the top 
player (and scriptable/extendable with Python).  For console 
screen-readers, you can use speakup for full system access 
(including bootup messages), or yasr or screader (there are a 
couple other packages I've seen but forget the names currently).

> 3, Does anyone know how to make bootable pen drives?

Most external drives (USB flash-drives or hard-drives, firewire 
drives, CF cards, SD cards, etc) appear as just another drive. 
When insert a USB flash-drive in my system, it usually appears as 
/dev/sda (use "dmesg | tail" to see what your drive appears as) 
which I can then partition with fdisk/cfdisk and then format the 
created partitions.  To make it bootable, you should be able to 
use Grub to install the boot-loader to this device.

> 4, can XP home still be obtained reasonably easily 

I can't help much with XP/Win2k.  They may be installable on 
removable drives, but I don't know how gracious their installer is.

> 5, Has anyone else had one of these netbooks? 

I've got a Dell Mini-9 (with stock Ubuntu) so I just use 
apt-get/synaptic to install packages I want.

Hope this helps,

-tim