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BRLSPEAK and Oralux - Distributions for Visually Impaired

BRLSPEAK and Oralux are two specialist Linux distributions catering for our less fortunate friends and colleagues who happen to be blind or otherwise visually impaired. But even if you have a perfect 20/20 vision, it is worth taking a closer look at these projects - they are not only enormously useful, they are great fun too!

BRLSPEAK www.brlspeak.net is a project started by Osvaldo La Rosa some 3 years ago. The author is visually impaired and since he also happens to be a great fan of GNU/Linux and Free Software, he decided to create a mini Linux distribution for those who suffer from similar disabilities. From the author's web site: "Too many blind computer users believe that only Microsoft operating systems are accessible for them with braille or speech - this is not the case! There are alternatives, and one of them is GNU/Linux. If you are looking for a free, powerful, blind-friendly, stable, open source, network-enabled, multi-tasking, multi-user and command line-minded operating system, then you must absolutely learn about GNU/Linux!"

BRLSPEAK is a mini Linux distribution (the size of the downloadable ISO image is only 36MB) with two objectives. Firstly, it has been designed in such a way that blind persons can install it without any outside assistance, and secondly, they should be able to pre-configure and compile the braille drivers all by themselves. These drivers will be immediately operational upon boot. All stated goals were achieved in November 2001 and BRLSPEAK version 7.0 was released later that month. It was based on Slackware's ZipSlack (hence the inflated version number), which can be installed in a directory on a DOS file system (no hard disk partitioning is necessary) or a ZIP drive. A new beta version, several related utilities, as well as a repository of pre-compiled braille terminal drivers are currently under development.

Oralux www.oralux.org is a recently launched project, first announced in July 2003. The distribution's web site does not provide much information about the project origins or its authors, but it does have a fair amount of useful documentation in the form of FAQs. Its major advantage over BRLSPEAK is that it runs directly from a bootable CD and no installation is required. It is based on Knoppix, with the usual excellent hardware auto-detection and immediate availability after boot. The size of the downloadable ISO image is under 400MB.

Booting Oralux is half the fun. After the obligatory hardware detection and configuration, the user is greeted with the sound of a cockerel, the distribution's official logo, which gives the user an opportunity to adjust speaker volume. The next step is the language selection with English as the only supported language in version 0.04 (courtesy of the Flite synthesis engine), although future releases might include Spanish and German, if there is sufficient demand and enthusiasm to contribute to the project. This is followed by a keyboard selection and a chance to install DECTalk, a popular commercial application with support for English and French, which some users might have available on their hard disks. All instructions are given in a surprisingly clear and crispy voice.

As soon as the initial configuration is completed, the users find themselves in Emacspeak. Emacspeak is a complete audio desktop, a speech interface that allows visually impaired users to interact independently and efficiently with their computers. This is a very simple definition and it would be more accurate to say that Emacspeak is a massive suite of dozens of speech-enabled applications. The range is quite astonishing and it includes multimedia control tools, authoring and productivity applications, and even development tools and games. Fancy a speech-enabled front-end to ssh? Or editing support for Perl with aural highlighting and access to online help? Or a spreadsheet application with support for customizing spoken feedback on a per-sheet basis? Yes it's all there. Also included is a simple, but standards-compliant w3 web browser and vm mail reader with full mime support.

It goes without saying that the usability of many of these applications depends on external factors. One of the more important ones is the skill of the user to navigate Emacspeak and those who are already familiar with Emacs and its commands will have a substantial advantage. But those who are not do not need to despair. A few essential commands are given right within the initial screen and further links to tutorials and online documentation are also provided. The complete Oralux web site with FAQs is available on the CD. Other notable features include the ability to save user preferences on a floppy disk, hard disk or USB pen drive and support for braille terminals.

Besides providing visually handicapped persons with access to computers and technology, the above projects demonstrate the tremendous value of open source software and the GPL license. Thanks to these qualities, those most in need are able to modify software to better suit their own requirements and release the modifications for the benefit of those who find themselves in a similar situation. This in turn creates communities of users, developers and enthusiasts with one common goal - to create better software and, in case of BRLSPEAK and Oralux, to enhance the quality of lives of our less fortunate fellow citizens. Well done!

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Distribution News

Debian GNU/Linux

The Debian Weekly News for August 19, 2003 is out. This week covers a review of LibraNet, GNU/LinEx distribution more free than Debian?, discussions on debian-legal on the definition of "software", new rescue CDs, and much more.

August 16, 2003 was the tenth anniversary of the first release of the Debian distribution. Debian has come a long way; congratulations are due to the many hundreds of developers who have worked at making it better over the years.

In commemoration of the event, "zwazo" has created 10 Years!, a wallpaper made with The GIMP for the 10 year anniversary of the Debian project with text from Ian Murdock's original announcement.

In this lengthy Bits from the RM, Debian Release Manager Anthony Towns examines the possibility of a stable release (of Sarge) before the end of the year. To get there, the experimental branch needs to be more widely used. Also outlined is a new policy for NMUs.

DebianPlanet covers a Netcraft article which says, "Debian is the second most popular Linux distribution we find on internet web sites, surpassed only by Red Hat, and leaving the likes of SuSE and Mandrake in its wake."

Manoj Srivastava, Debian Project Secretary, has re-opened some pending issues. The issues are: Constitutional amendment: disambiguation of 4.1.5 and Constitutional amendment: alternate disambiguation of 4.1.5.

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Gentoo Weekly Newsletter -- Volume 2, Issue 33

The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of August 18, 2003 is out. This week Gentoo migrates to a more robust DNS infrastructure, more photos from LWE, and more.

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Trustix Secure Linux

The TSL developers have announced that the contributions area for TSL 2.0 is now up and running. Those with packages they wish to contribute may place the package on a convenient web server, and tell the contrib maintainers where to find it.

The TSL developers have also announced a public testing area for TSL users.

Trustix has released a bug fix advisory for several TSL 2.0 packages including anaconda, ftpd-BSD, iputils, nss_ldap, ntp, openssh, pam_ldap, perl, perl-dbi, postfix, reiserfsprogs, swup, swupcron, and sysklogd.

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Conectiva Linux 9 update CD

Conectiva has announced an update ISO image for Conectiva Linux 9. This update CD contains a new and improved installer as well as all official packages released as updates up to July 4, 2003.

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Slackware Linux

Slackware Linux has ugraded KDE, GNOME, made some changes to make CUPS and LPRng play better together, and lots more. See the slackware-current changelog for complete details.

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Red Hat Linux

Red Hat has new cdrtools packages fix locking issues that occur while burning CD ROMs while running newer errata kernels.

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New Distributions

Mepis Linux

Mepis Linux is a desktop Linux that is also easy to configure as a dedicated server. It is designed for both personal and business purposes. The first official release was version 2003.0, dated May 10, 2003. The live CD allows installation or functions as a recovery CD. MEPIS Linux 2003.06 for Pentium processors, released June 16, 2003, includes features such as automatic hardware configuration, NTFS partition resizing, ACPI power management, WiFi support, anti-aliased truetype fonts, personal firewall, KDE 3.1.2, and much more. MEPIS Linux is derived from the Debian GNU/Linux code base. There is a review of Mepis at PCLinuxOnline.

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Minor distribution updates

Astaro Security Linux

Astaro Security Linux has released stable v4.010 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: This Up2Date added new features to the SMTP Content Filter such as MIME error checking, a global whitelist, user authentication for SMTP Smarthost, and improved anti-spam configuration options. It also included minor bugfixes for the SMTP and POP3 proxy and fixed timezone files."

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Coyote Linux

Coyote Linux has released v2.02 with major security fixes. "Changes: The internal SSH server was upgraded to dropbear .35 to fix a remote security exploit. Bugfixes were made to the port-forwarding code. Additional items were added to the command line menu to make it easier to edit some of the system scripts."

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Damn Small Linux

Damn Small Linux has released v0.4.4 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Not many cosmetic changes were made, but some functionality was added. Mount.App was added, providing a handy app for quickly mounting and unmounting drives. Newly added programs include telnet, less, un/zip, autofs, and a new version of Links-Hacked."

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dyne:bolic GNU/Linux

dyne:bolic has released v1.0beta with major feature enhancements. "Changes: With this release all features planned for 1.0 are implemented, including nesting (save home and settings in a file on the hard disk or USB storage, also with AES128 encryption), new customized configuration tools in GTK+, support for many language locales, automount of USB dongles and cameras, firewire support, new applications for video acquisition, editing, online conferencing, and CD burning. There are various updates aimed at better performance and stability, and more VGA cards and video4linux devices are now supported."

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MoviX2

MoviX has released MoviX2 0.3.1pre3 with minor feature enhancements. "Changes: Support for CastleRock EPIA's video cards was improved. A script to automatically install MoviX2 on USB pens and CompactFlash cards was added. An application to visualize pictures was added."

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NSA Security Enhanced Linux

NSA Security Enhanced Linux has released v2003081307 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: The SELinux module has been merged into the mainline kernel as of 2.6.0-test3. This release includes new kernel patches based on the 2.6.0-test3 kernel and a backport of the 2.6 SELinux module to the 2.4.21 kernel. The new API is consistent between 2.4 and 2.6. The old 2.4 API and user-space utilities are no longer actively maintained. There have been a number of bug fixes and cleanups to the library and utilities, as well as new contributions to the example policy."

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PXES Linux Thin Client

PXES Linux Thin Client has released v0.6-4 with minor bugfixes. "Changes: There have been some fixes and small changes in this new release. The kernel was upgraded to 2.4.20-6pxes including Tulip NIC support. The ICA Client 7.00 has now had some small bugs fixed. A new LTSP session was added to support existing deployments, session parameters can be provided by the DHPC options, as usual, or can be included in the kernel command line or remote configuration files or even asked at run time. Rdesktop version is selectable from 1.2.0 and 1.1.0. There is a new libcrypto.so.0.9.6-pxes. Pre-built images can be found in pxes-images featuring initrd, NBI, and ISO."

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RUNT

RUNT has released v2.0 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: Rebuilt from Slackware 9.0 and updates. Includes hotplug, improving hardware autodetection. Kernel 2.4.21 includes substantially improved device support and support for USB 2.0. It installs the APM module by default (remove from rc.modules if you don't want it), and deletes the DHCP cache on startup to prevent requests for previous IPs."

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Sentry Firewall

Sentry Firewall has released v1.5.0-rc3 with major feature enhancements. "Changes: There have been a lot of updates since the last release including an updated kernel, snort, and squid. The howto has also been updated."

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Distribution reviews

Ark Linux, taking penguins on a ride to the future (TuxReports)

TuxReports reviews Ark Linux 1.0 alpha8. "After grub is loaded and KDE starts, Ark Linux does an autologin using the default user arklinux. This user id is disabled but a tool called kapabilities allows the login to occur. It also allows the user to install software without access to root. Instead of a login prompt, a new user is greeted with the KDE desktop."

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