[arch-general] anyone had problems with archlinux-2008.06-ftp-i686.iso?

[Chris Brannon]

"Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> writes:

> I agree. At the very least, we can offer an alternate "accessibility"
> version which would have tools like this for blind users and the like.
>
> Chris, what software do you need, or think others may need, when it
> comes to things like this?

Thank you so much for your interest!
I hope that the following discussion is concise, because this is complex.

Software necessary for a talking boot:
* alsa-utils (to unmute the soundcard at boot)
* espeak (a text-to-speech engine available in [community])
* speakup (a kernel-based screenreader, not currently available in Arch)
* speech-dispatcher and speechd-up (see below)

Speakup is only available from a git repository.  There is a tarball
somewhere on their website, but it is terribly stale.  I mirror the git
repo, so I could send a tarball of the recent sources.
Previous versions required one to patch the kernel, but the latest version
can be built without applying patches, as long as one is using a 2.6.26
(or later) kernel.

There's also a user-space screenreader for the console, and that is what
I used on my remastered ISO.  It has to be started after logging in, so
most blind people don't like it.  OTOH, Speakup gives one a talking login
prompt.  If one uses a hardware synthesizer, he can have speech as soon as
the modules are loaded.  If he uses a software speech synthesizer like espeak,
then speech can start from the init scripts.

We also need software to communicate between speakup and the espeak TTS engine.
That's what speech-dispatcher and speechd-up are for.
Speakup just sends text to a character device called /dev/softsynth.
The tarball for speech-dispatcher is here: 
http://www.freebsoft.org/pub/projects/speechd/speech-dispatcher-0.6.7.tar.gz
The tarball for speechd-up is stale (late 2006).  The CVS version has quite
a few improvements and bugfixes.

I've built and installed all of these packages from source on other distros, so
I'll gladly learn to use makepkg and contribute some pkgbuilds.

Thomas asked about squashfs overlays and boot options.  Plenty of other
distros require that we type something at the boot prompt to get speech.
We can't read the prompt, but we can listen for the CD drive to
stop spinning.  A long timeout from the bootloader helps here.

> The other option is that remastering the CD was goofy. I expect the
> iso was unpacked, and software added to it which may or may not have
> been built against the same libraries. I am assuming Chris did not go
> through the process of building the ISO with archiso.

Aaron is correct.  I linked some programs against libraries from Debian,
and I didn't go through the archiso process.  Bet this is the problem.
The drive and media seem good, because I can copy the data back to the HD
without issues.

-- Chris