The world is burning around me and I’m burning disks. This is part two of my adventure trying to get a speech enabled installation of Linux working on my old PC. I’m posting this with a lot of detail in it because I intend to share it with the author of the distribution that I ended up installing. Newbie’s like me need a little more help than the existing documentation provides and I hope he will link to this or even borrow the relevant text from it. I’ll call it open source.
I ended my last account in premature triumph that I had a console based installation of Fedora 12 up and running with Speakup. See the previous post for links if you’re interested, but I’m about to give you better ones if you want a speech enabled installation. I dove into a beginner’s book on the Linux command line and quickly learned that my installation was severely crippled. Only the most basic commands were available. The man command didn’t even work. Doubtless I could have fixed it up if I was experienced in Linux, but I’m installing it because I want to learn it. I didn’t have the skills needed to heal a broken system out of the box so to speak. Forcing the installation routine into text mode results in an extremely minimalist installation.
I decided to start over and try the GUI installation again. I muddled through with the help of a magnifier and the camera on my phone. It was very blurry at such a close range but I managed to read with it. I need the text very big. That installation did result in a working system, but not one I could use. After my last entry here I learned that most distributions of Linux do now have a screen reader. It’s called Orca, and also provides screen magnification. It’s not quite as powerful as the big name Windows screen readers, but it does provide access to the GUI Gnome environment. However, when I started Orca there was no sound. The magnification worked, but not well. Portions of the screen would not fill in correctly when magnified, making it almost impossible to do anything. I suspect the problem with the speech was easily solvable if one could use the computer without it or had the experience to troubleshoot the sound, but not me.
That’s when another Internet search turned up VINUX. VINUX takes a unique approach to the problem of a speech enabled installation. It boots a functional copy of the OS from the CD, complete with Orca speech. Icons on the screen or through the system menu accessed by pressing ALT-F1 allow you to install from the CD, or just play around with the OS to get a feel for it. It can also install to a USB drive. VINUX is a Debian distribution that is modified to run Orca and Speakup as part of the installation, so that once you’re done you have a talking OS. You don’t need an old hardware synthesizer like the serial Dectalk I needed for the Speakup modified Fedora installation.
My fancy new Fedora desktop being essentially worthless to me, I decided to try VINUX. The documentation on the site gave me just enough information to get the CD going, but I quickly ran into some minor bumps in the road. The image isn’t really aimed at beginners. You will do well to read up on basic keyboard navigation in Gnome, which I still have not done. In fact, what I think I will do before formally offering this up is to go ahead and do that, then separate this narrative into a more focused beginner’s guide. For the moment, maybe it will still be helpful if it comes up in a search by other blind users looking for a workable solution. I’m going to work mostly from memory, so I take full responsibility for any inaccuracy you may find.
VINUX comes with a slightly different look than most. Instead of the typical top and bottom strips, there is a double column of large icons at the side of the screen. According to the author this was done to make common tasks easier to find and use for people who are visually impaired. Trial and error didn’t yield up the key combination that would get me into the icon panel at the side of the screen. Directly clicking on one of the columns didn’t work either, or at least using the arrow keys didn’t result in Orca saying anything as I attempted to move around. Remembering what little I did read on using Orca, I found the setting to speak tool tips on the General tab. With that turned on, I was able to locate the icon for installing from the CD. However I found this to be unreliable, probably due to running the system off the CD and the age of the CPU I am running. I later discovered that pressing ALT-F1 brings up a menu from which you can navigate to the installation by arrowing down to System, then pressing the right arrow to go into it. Press the right arrow again to enter the Administration menu. The installation options are near the bottom of the menu. You can go up to wrap around to the bottom.
Here are some quick notes about Orca. It occasionally stopped speaking. It did not appear to have crashed, but I found in the VINUX documentation that pressing CTRL-SHIFT-O would cause it to restart. If you lose speech this should bring it back, though once I had to do it twice. You may find it helpful to use the Orca link above to get acquainted with its basic keyboard commands. I also found that when using the partitioning program that we will come to shortly it did not read the new choice in a drop-down after you selected it. If you have doubts about what you selected, do it again. Again this could be due to a combination of old PC and running off a CD. On a bit of a trivial note, American listeners may need a little adjustment time getting to understand Orca’s speech. It’s a fairly good speech engine, but it speaks with a British accent and has a more robotic sound than you will be used to with a Windows screen reader. This is something you can change once you’ve installed. I switched to Flight, which is very clear.
Once you have found and launched the installation program, you will get a warning that this is an advanced installation and not to use it unless you know what you are doing. This is a fair warning. My first attempt at installation resulted in an unbootable machine, even though I thought I had read and understood best practices for Linux partitioning. In my case I am using a spare machine so rendering it a boat anchor was just a minor setback. If you are installing to a computer that already has valuable data on it, make sure you back up and are sure of the choices you should make.
The installation program will then ask you to select the drive, which you do by use of the arrow keys and Enter. I don’t know if this would be presented if the computer has only one hard drive. Mine has two. The partitioning utility will launch and present you with a list of current partitions. You will land on a button whose use is unclear. Press Tab to move through the sections of the screen until you find the tree view and select partitions by moving with the arrow keys. What you do from here depends on what kind of installation you are planning to do. I am not experienced enough to advise you, but I will tell you what I did to get my system running.
In my case, I had a previous installation of Linux, so it appeared at first that I had little work to do. However, the installation program specifically states that you need a swap partition, and no swap partition was present. I did some reading and thought I understood what to do, but apparently I didn’t. I left the boot partition unchanged, deleted a second partition (press Delete) and established a swap partition and another for everything else. My first mistake may have been in how I arranged them. The partitions will be set up in the order they appear on the screen. I put the swap directly after the boot and then added the largest part after that. The advice I read said to put the swap at the end. Whatever the reason, the first install was a dud. It may also be that I didn’t make the boot partition large enough, though I didn’t change it much from what Fedora created. No errors appeared to be reported, but I suspect the installer was not able to create a bootable configuration the way I had it arranged. The solution was to go with the minimum configuration suggested by the documentation. I put one large partition on the drive marked as bootable and the swap at the end. To summarize what I read about the swap size, it should be at least as big as the physical RAM you have in your system but double to be safe. Servers might potentially need more. Though I plan to play with the system as a test server, the install doesn’t appear to provide enough flexibility to set up the partitions as recommended by the things I read. I think I can adjust later as I gain more experience.
Let’s get back to the process. Again, I only have experience with creating a fresh Linux only setup, so that is what I will describe. To make a fresh start, delete the existing partition(s) using the Del key. Now, create the root partition. Press CTRL-N to bring up the dialog. Orca will read the whole thing. You can sometimes stop it by use of the CTRL key, or you can interrupt it by pressing Tab to move around the screen. The first field contains the amount of free space you want to have before the new partition starts. For our purposes, leave it alone. Press Tab to move to the size field. You can type in megabytes how large you want the partition to be, or you can use the arrows and PGUP/PGDN to move by ones or by hundreds. For our purposes, leave this field at maximum and move to the next one. This tells you how much space will be free. Since we are only going to create a root partition and a swap partition, set the amount of free space to the size you want your swap partition to be. Next will be a checkbox that toggles whether or not the program should round to the nearest cylinder. Leave it checked. Next is a drop-down to choose whether the partition is Primary or Extended. Leave it Primary and go to the file system drop-down. Press space here and use the arrows to select ext3. Press Space or Enter to select. As mentioned above, Orca may not read your new choice. When you press Tab again, Orca will just say “text.” This is the field for labeling the partition. I left this blank. Tab to the OK button and Press Enter.
You will be returned to the tree view. Highlight your new partition and press ALT-P to bring down the Partition menu. Arrow to the Manage Flags option near the bottom and press Enter. You will be presented with a dialog having a series of checkable options. Make sure Boot is checked by moving to it with the arrows and pressing Space if necessary. Tab to the close button and press Enter.
You will again be in the partition list. Make sure the unallocated entry is highlighted and press CTRL-N. Everything should be just like you want it except for the file system. Tab to that and select Linux Swap. Tab to OK and press Enter. You are now ready to commit your changes. This is done from the edit menu. There may be and ALT key combination to get to it, but it isn’t ALT-E. I arrived there by pressing ALT-P again and then using the left arrow to go backwards to the Edit menu. There you will find the option to apply your changes. You will be presented with a last chance to reconsider as what you are about to do will destroy the data preexisting on the disk. Pressing Enter commits you for good.
Orca will speak progress as it goes. When completed, a small dialog will appear giving you the opportunity to review the details of what was done. If you’re as green as I am you may not find that very useful. I didn’t’ look at it. Tab to the Close button and press Enter. You’re ready now to quit the partition editor. CTRL-Q is supposed to do that and it did as I just had the program up for reference while writing this, but when I tried it from the install it didn’t. Fortunately the old Windows sequence of ALT-F4 did quit the program.
The installer will ask you a few more questions, which I may or may not be remembering in their proper order. Each is answered by highlighting a choice with the arrow keys and pressing enter. First you will be asked where the swap drive is. It will be shown as /dev/hda2 or something similar. Then you will be asked where to put the root. Choose your boot partition. It may also ask where to put /home, but I think it skipped that question the second time I ran it since I only had one place it could go. You will also be asked what to do with the boot loader. For a single OS installation like we are doing here, select the master boot record (MBR.) The installation will now commence. Orca may be rather chatty at this point. Sometimes the CTRL key will shut him up for a while, but you may hear a lot of things being read as the installation progresses. When the process is finished, you will be given the opportunity to reboot your system to test the new installation. If all is well, the next thing you hear should be what sounds like Orca asking for your login information. There is no screen review capability at this point, as Orca is not really loaded yet. The login prompt is pre-recorded. You will not get audible feedback as you type in your user name, press Enter, type your password and press Enter again. You will get a message saying that your login was accepted (assuming it was) and the desktop should come up. At this point you’re pretty much on your own, as that’s about all I know right now. I did find that on my system for some reason the right hand ALT key is not performing its assigned function from the desktop. To bring up the menus accessible from the ALT-F1 key combination, I have to use the left ALT. I do not know if this will be common to any installation or if it’s some peculiarity of mine. I also ran into a problem waking the computer up from sleep mode. The monitor did not revive and Orca did not speak. I had to power off. This probably is an issue with my particular machine and may be resolvable by finding the right hardware driver fixes.
Note that on some systems, including mine, the shutdown from the CD may freeze. If this happens, you will need to manually power off your system. Allow some time before resorting to this as the shutdown process is slow. The CD should eject, and you may want to remove the CD from the tray at this point.
Finally, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Tony Sales for putting this package together. It was very gratifying to be able to perform an installation of a new OS with no sighted assistance and not even resort to hand magnifiers that don’t’ make things big enough for me anyway. I’m so delighted that I hate to even make any suggestions for improvement, but I do have a couple. First, a more newbie friendly document would be very helpful with perhaps some links for other sources of beginner’s information. Maybe I can help with that, though being inexperienced myself I may not be the best choice. Second, even old junkers like my test PC usually have DVD drives these days. A full installation image that could be burned to a DVD would be a nice touch, thus eliminating the need to install stock programs after the fact.
Thank you once again for doing this. Maybe as I become more proficient I can be of use in making it even better. From time to time maybe I will post some more progress notes and tips from what I learn along the way.
