Darragh Ó Héiligh blog and accessibility guides

I've just noticed that the OpenSuSE weekly news has referenced the OpenSuSE11IndependentlyWithAccessibilitySupport.aspx" target="_blank">audio walk through of the installation of OpenSuSE 11 on this site.  Nice to see people are taking note of it.

My server took a turn for the worst on Sunday afternoon around 2PM. 

Emma and I tried to revive it but were unsuccessful.

Procedure used was: Remove CMOS battery.  This prooved to do absolutely F all.  Next procedure was to use motherboard jumpers to reset the BIOS configuration to the factory defaults.  This also prooved equally as pointless.

Finally, I plugged the server out, re-enabled the DHCP server on the router and set a static DNS pointer to point to it so the server is currently not needed to facilitate internet access on the network.

It is hoped that a new server can be sourced soon as using GMail to read my mail  from several accounts instead of Outlook via RPC over HTTP is a right pain in the ass.

Quotations are currently welcome.  Price range is aproximitly four to five hundred Euro.  The HP offering for this type of server is eight hundred euro however the specification is frankly: Pants!

Dell seem to have a few nice servers for around this price range however I'm not sold that they'll be the best option yet.

Why not go for something more expensive? I hear you ask? Well, yes, more money means more power however I want to keep running costs to an absolute minimum.  As a result of pressure from people in my office and the feer that I'll lose all the backups that I've made to the server, I've decided to go for a system that supports at least rade 1 at a minimum.  However, if I go for something powerful in the server line it gets more noisy and more expensive to run.  Sure I'd love to go for one of the 900 range like the one sitting behind me waiting for me to install the driver for the second rade controler that I installed this morning but that thing makes the office vibrate when it's running something!"  OK. that might be a bit over the top but you get my meaning!  It's loud! There's also a HP laserjet 5110CN behind me printing out something for the whole morning that's starting to get on my nerves too!

If you have any suggestion how to shut up the printer and oh, of course, what server to get, please let me know.

Installing BRLTTY is very easy however you would be forgiven if you believed that you had problems.  If you followed my installing ESpeak guide you'll see that libspeak is installed with ESpeak however BRLTTY doesn't see it.  Even if we didn't install it, unless you want to use ESpeak with BRLTTY, you'll not need it.  So, to install BRLTTY, do the following:

• Download BRLTTY:
  wget http://www.mielke.cc/brltty/releases/brltty-3.10-1.i386.rpm
• Install BRLTTY.
  rpm -ivh brltty-3.10-1.i386.rpm --nodeps
• Run BRLTTY with the command:
  brltty

If you don't put the --nodeps switch in wiht the install command, you'll see the dependency error shown below:

error: Failed dependencies:
libbrlapi.so.0.5 is needed by brltty-3.10-1.i386
libspeechd.so.2 is needed by brltty-3.10-1.i386

Enjoy.

Good morning all,  I've taken a small break from using the Mac this morning as I wanted to get sum work done on my Linux" machine.  When I say work though, I don't mean that the installation of Fedora needs anything done to it, I just needed to write up a few things while on the train this morning and I rather use OpenOffice than Nisus writer pro on OSX 10.I have to admit though, this is possibly more because I'm familiar with how OpenOffice does things now and I'm still getting use to all the commands on the very different Mac keyboard.  However, I have to say, I much prefer the Mac keyboard to the one on this laptop. 

As you'll see from my previous post from last night, I've submitted the second walk through for OpenSuSE 11.  I was shocked at the responses that I got from the first walk through.  I originally thought that the most I could hope for was to raise awareness of the new accessibility features within OpenSuSE 11 however from what I'm seeing in my in box most days; people are really interested in using this distribution.  Mainly because of its links to SLED and SLES, the more professional and enterprise targeted products.  I only hope now that people who use it will go on over to the OpenSuSE Bugzilla site and submit as many bugs that they find as possible so that OpenSuSE 11.3 builds upon the success of version 11. 

Sticking with the topic of Audio walk throughs and even text based instructions, what would you like to see next?  Of course, I'll continue to try to record a walk through when a new version of Ubuntu or OpenSuSE is released to ensure that new users have a source to follow if they require it but I'd also like to challenge myself as well.  Let me know what you’re finding hard to configure or get working and I'll see what I can do.  I'm not promising that I'll have any more success than you've had but as they say, two heads are better than one. 

With the aim of illustrating that the OpenSuSE Linux" distribution is becoming a more viable option for visually impaired computer users with each new release, I have released a second audio walk through that will guide listeners through updating the operating system, navigating through the Orca preferences dialogue, using firefox 3 and of course, installing the ESpeak synthesizer. 

This walk through will get you up and running with OpenSuSE with a synthesizer that is easy to understand and responds to your commands quickly.

Get the second OpenSuSE 11 walkthrough here.

If you have yet to listen to the first walk through guiding users through the installation of OpenSuSE, get it here.

I think I posted a few weeks ago about how it is now possible for a person who is blind or visually impaired to independently install the OpenSuSE distribution thanks to the enhancements in version 11.  Because of the benefit that this new accessibility brings I felt that it was very important to create an audio walk through to guide new and more experienced users of Linux" through the installation of this very powerful and widely used distribution. Students studying Novell related topics often find that the accessibility of this distribution needs improvement.  A lot of their crys have been acknowledged.

This review also demonstrates the first ever accessible boot menu.  For the first time that I know of, the boot menu is now completely accessible to people who cannot see the screen.  Simply wait for the short beep when you turn on the PC and before the operating system even starts, press F9 to launch a very cut down screen reader.  this will enable you to read the boot menu and the added functions accessible by using the F keys.  Example, the language menu accessible with F2 or the video mode menu accessible via F3.

As always, your comments, suggestions, questions or of course, complaints are welcome by Email or by leaving a comment to my blog.

Get the audio walk through here:

The cost of assistive technology for people with any disability is very high.  Everything from Magnifiers to Screen readers to Braille displays to light displaying door bells to synthesizers for people who cannot speak to memory training devices are very expensive.  Furthermore, there is a lot of choice in this market in some areas.  Equipment or alterations that suit some people will not suit others even though their disability may be the same.  For this reason, it is often very difficult to know what you need.  People comfortable with researching technical reviews and asking questions on public forums are fortunate as they can get a better idea of what is capable by using assistive software or hardware however nothing beats actually using it.  It's very similar to when someone is buying a car.  You can read reviews, talk to other owners but nothing beats getting to know it during a test drive.

The day of test driving assistive technology is finally here!

Thanks to www.try-it.ie, you can now look through their extensive resource of assistive hardware or software for a wide range of disabilities and if it's in stock you can apply to try it.  The idea is simple but the effect is powerful.   There is a lot of choice out there but unfortunately the majority of people don't take advantage of it.  Outspoken for Mac OSX 10.5, Orca in Linux", Window Eyes in Windows are three examples of screen readers for visually impaired people that most people haven't even thought of trying as their comfortable with Jaws and Windows and until now the facility hasn't been there to do this without spending a lot of time or money.  I'm sure that people with other disabilities are the same!  They get use to one adaptation or assistive technology and because of the cost involved with testing new options they cant justify trying anything else. 

Unfortunately my experience in adaptive technology is focused on the narrow field of visual impairment however the resource on www.try-it is not.  I would urge any of you who know anyone with a disability to take a look.  Tell as many people as possible about this and make it a resource that is used.  As they say.  Use it or loose it.  It's your choice.

www.try-it.ie

I've just configured Evolution to check my Exchange mail box on my windows 2003 server

Good stuff!

I'm off to bed now.... or very shortly.  I think I've done enough on this machine for now. 

Greetings all!

Finally! Finally! 

I got Fedora 9 to work with my BCM4312 wireless network card. 

I'll have to post more information on this tomorrow when I have the energy and the time but for now.  All I can say is: YAY!

I've been working on this since Tuesday! Wednesday night I actually sat here from 8PM until a quarter past twelve trying to figure it out. Today I found the missing piece of the puzzil.

Take a look at Synergy. It's a cool little application that works on Windows, Linux" and Mac OSX.  It allows you to work as if you had a hardware KVM attached to your computers however it is much more powerful than that.  by dragging your mouse to the left, right, bottom or top of one of your screens you can change to any computer that's connected.  so, I've an OpenSuSE installation on one of the computers here now as I've removed Vista to do some testing.  to use the keyboard and Mouse on this main computer on the OpenSuSE computer I just drag to the mouse and the functions change instantly.  IN edition to this, my screen reader, jaws tells me what desktop I've just gone to right out of the box! i.e. without any customization.

Installing it in OpenSuSE was very straight forward and getting it working on Windows was equally as simple.

There's one more feature that I almost forgot to tell you about.  In edition to letting you share input devices, it also lets you lock all your operating systems at once.  I.e, you cannot use them until you type in your password into the main computer and you can also share the one clipboard between all machines.  Both are really cool features to have!

Until now, I've been unable to get ESpeak working with Gnome Speech in OpenSuSE however after installing OpenSuSE 11 onto a PC in work last night I've finally got it!

Here are the instructions.  As always, feel free to Email me directly with questions if your stuck.

• Download the ESpeak sources.
  wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/espeak/espeak-1.37-source.zip
• Install the required package dependencies
  yast -i make, autoconf gcc-c++ gnome-speech-devel portaudio
• Decompress the archive containing ESpeak
  unzip espeak*
• Change to the ESpeak directory.
  cd /espeak*
• Make a new directory for the ESpeak files
  mkdir /usr/share/espeak-data
• Copy the files directly to this new directory.
  cp espeak-data/* -rf /usr/share/espeak-data/
• Now change to the source directory.
  cd src
• Make a backup of this file.... Just in case.
  cp portaudio.h portaudio-backup.h
• Override this file with the version for PortAudio 19.
  cp portaudio19.h portaudio.h
• Start the compilation process
  make
• Now copy the binary files to the required directories.
  cp libespeak.so.1.1.37 /usr/lib/
• and again.
  cp speak_lib.h /usr/include/
• Update the system so these new libraries are recognised.
  ldconfig
• Make a symbolic link to a file that does not contain a version at the end so Gnome-Speech can see it.
  ln -s /usr/lib/libespeak.so.1.1.37 /usr/lib/espeak.so
• Change to your home directory
  cd
• Download the Gnome-Speech sources.
  wget ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-speech/0.4/gnome-speech-0.4.19.tar.gz
• Uncompress the downloaded archive.
  tar -xzvf gnome-speech*
• Change to the gnome-speech source directory.
  cd gnome-speech*
• Prepare the sources for compilation. Tell it where to look for ESpeak.
  ./configure.sh --with-espeak-dir=/usr/share/espeak-data/
• Compile the sources.
  make
• Remove the running version of Gnome-Speech.
  rpm -e gnome-speech
• Install the compiled binaries.
  make install

Note, I've used the star (*) sign a lot during these instructions. This is mainly because I was too lasy to go looking for the version strings every time I wanted to go to a directory. You can either type star or press tab on the command line to autocomplete. If you have not come across this before, don't panic. There is plenty of documentation out there on making your life easier while using the Command Line Interface (CLI) for short.

I recieved an Email a few days ago asking a few questions:  Does TTSynth work with Fedora? If a user has a .deb package, can this be used in Fedora? Does TTSynth work with Orca?

Because I rather answer questions publicly to answer them for other users who may be wondering the same thing, I thought I'd post the answer here.

Firstly. Yes, The TTSynth text To Speech synthesizer  (TTS) for short works with Fedora, Orca and anything else that supports Gnome speech and / or speech-dispatcher. 

In Fedora, you need the RPM package to install this.  If you only purchased the .deb package, contact the seller over at www.ttsynth.com and ask them for the .rpm package.  I had to do this last year and I didn't have a problem at all.

To get TTSynth running, first install compat-libstdc++-296 using yum install compat-libstdc++-296 then just install ttsynth-core-1.0 using rpm -ivh ttsynth-core*.rpm

To get TTSynth running with Gnome, use yum install gnome-speech-ttsynth* then restart Orca.  Once running, just configure Orca to use the TTSynth synth instead of Festival or ESpeak.  If you want ESpeak, Festival and TTSynth support, you'll need to install gnome-speech from source.  Not a difficult task so if you want instructions, drop me another mail and I'll talk you through it.

You think that's complicated, try installing it on OpenSuSE!  That distribution will have you balt from tairing your hair out after hours of frustration!  In the end, just install TTSynth with the rpm --nodeps option after of course installing all the documented dependencies.  Nine times out of ten, it works. Installing Speakup is easy enough as documented previously on this blog too. 

Morning all. 

This is the first post from the train on my freshly installed version of Fedora 9!  It's taken a while to get this far but finally, after a week of playing around, I have almost everything that I want working.  There are a few things that I'd like to figure out. The screen should detect that it's been rotated and change it's layout to match however this doesn't happen yet.  It's going to be handy as I'll map the buttons on the screen to up and down arrows so I can read without using the keyboard therefore using a much smaller space while on the train.  The second thing I want to get working is the finger print reader.  It's not an absolutely necessary feature however I like to have it as it cuts down on typing lengthy passwords so if there's a way of getting it to work then I'd like to investigate it. Finally, I'd like to get the touch screen to work properly.  At the moment, it's recognized however not calibrated.  It's not something I particularly need but again, it's a feature of the laptop so I'd like to have it usable. 

In terms of accessibility, I've everything working now I think.  I've updated Orca so it's using the latest version from SVN, I've installed the Espeak synthesizer so I don't have to put up with that horrible Festival voice any more, I've configured it so Espeak works even when other sound is playing and I've even got speakup up and running with the TTSynth synthesizer for the console!  Now, that last bit took a bit more work than I expected!  In previous versions of speakup the keyword for software speech was sftsyn.  In this version, 3.3, it's soft.  That would have been fine but there was no documentation of this that I could find on the installed system so yesterday after giving up trying to figure it out I sent amail to the Speakup discussion list. Another thing that confused me was that speakup was no longer in /proc/ and instead was installed into /lib/modules when running.  I got a hint of this while independently trying to determine what had changed in this release as I saw files such as speakup_soft in there.  Another thing has changed also, to start speakup; the command is no longer speakup_synth-sftsyn.  It's now speakup.synth=soft.  Oh,fortunately though, to stop it getting in the way of boot up and trying to speak everything, you can add the switch speakup.quiet=1 to shut it up.  When you start your synthesizer it will start talking normally.

One thing that really drove me crazy over the weekend while setting up speakup was the Nano editor!  The stupid thing kept putting things on the next line when I typed too much and it didn't seem to give me a command for turning off line wrap.  So, for ages, I couldn’t figure out why grub wasn't booting the speakup kernel until I finally used the MCEditor program instead.  I wish MC was more accessible.  I love its functionality.  I use to have a custom version of that a few years ago that worked really well with BRLTTY but I've no idea where it is any more.  I really need to set up a SAN, Storage Area Network at home.  I've so many applications and packages for both Windows and Linux"; a lot of it gets deleted when I'm working on other things.  The problem is of course that I usually come back to Windows or Linux" after a while and I need the same programs or packages again.

So, in conclusion, if you’re thinking of setting a HP TX 1020 laptop and you’re having problems, good luck!  You’re going to need it!  A lot of the hardware such as the screen, rotation and finger print reader seems to need a lot of work to get going properly.  At the moment though I'm really happy with how it's performing in Fedora Linux".  Much Much better than it was in Windows anyway!

As I planned a few weeks ago, I installed Fedora 9 Linux" onto the HP TX 1020 ultra portable laptop I have here. I had Ubuntu 8.04 on it before this but had a lot of problems getting the wireless card working.  It took me a while to find the right windows driver to use with the NDISWrapper. I did get it working in the end though and I have the INF file saved on a USB hard drive in case I need it again. 

Fedora has worked on it well so far however I’ve not tried out wireless yet.  Fedora 9 is using Kernel 2.6.25 where as Ubuntu 8.04 is using Kernel 2.6.24 so I’m hoping that the Broadcom modules have been fixed in the later version.  2.6.26 is also out so I might install that from source.  I’ll see how it goes.

The one thing I noticed from an accessibility perspective when I installed Fedora 9 was Orca was broken. 

To fix it though, just install gnome-common and intltool then download Orca from the 2.22 branch on SVN and it will work as expected.  Commands are similar to the following:

su
yum update
Good idea to do that to make sure your system is up to date...
yum install intltool gnome-common
svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/Orca/branches/gnome-2-22 orca
cd orca
./autogen.sh
make
make install
exit

Their from memory but I’m reasonably certain their accurate.

I hate the festival synthesizer so the second thing I did was install Espeak.
Simply:

yum install espeak gnome-speech-espeak*
Orca key + q and confirm the quit with alt q.
Kill gnome speech by typing
killall gnome-speech
Restart orca by pressing alt F2, type orca and hit enter.

Go into the orca preferences, into the speech tab and select the ESpeak synthesizer.

The next task I’m working on is installing Speakup.  I’ve installed the TTSynth synthesizer but getting speakup to run is a bit trickier. I can see that it’s compiled into the kernel so it should be running but it’s not created anything in /proc where normally, you should find /proc/speakup if it was loaded into memory. I added the command to run it in /boot/grub/menu.lst however I noticed this morning that it actually says to add it in /boot/grub/grub.conf.  I actually thought this was a typo originally but I’ll pull out the laptop when I have time and try it again with that conf file instead of menu.lst. 

I’ve also installed the firefox navigation plug in that was released via the Orca discussion list and Firefox 3 is working really well!

The resulting set up should contain open office, pidgin messenger, firefox a media player or two and speakup in the console so I can use text based apps more easily.  It’ll not be the most powerful set up but perfect for working on the train and connecting to the internet when I’m away from home.

As a result of my audio walk through for Linux" installation and configuration, I get dozens of mail every week asking me questions and asking for help.  If IO responded to them I’d have time for very little else! I get around to a few though but recently, if your mail doesn’t jump out at me or catch my interest then unfortunately there’s a good chance you won’t be answered. 

One mail that really jumped out at me on was from Sally who on the very first line said her boyfriend was a computer shagging Linux" geek.  That alone made me laugh so, that’s the secret people, I’ve a lot on at the moment so if you want an answer, make me interested!

Speaking of recordings, at some stage soon I will continue the series on Ubuntu 8.04 by looking at Firefox 3 but I need to free up some time first.

Good morning!

Firstly, thanks to Marie Boran for her mention of this little corner of the web in this mornings Irish Independent.

Secondly, with some messing around last night, the small HP TX 1020 laptop I blogged about yesterday is actually working properly now so I'll have more time and resources to blog on the train etc. Funnily enough, that's generally the place where my brain races and I've actually stuff to talk about!

Remember that wireless network card problem? It's sorted it's self with an update of the driver from the main Ubuntu repository. Great! no messing around with the NDISWrapper!

Added note:  Actually I take it back.  The wireless networks around me are now detected however it still won't connect so if your looking for that NDISWrapper guide stay tuned.

Well, I got absolutely sick of Vista by 3PM yesterday.  after only taking the laptop out of it's case at ten to! Stupid thing took so long to boot that I just turned it off and left destroying it until I got back from work.

So, because I tried to download Fedora 9 yesterday but the download speed I was getting was just absolutely terrible, I thought I'd stick Ubuntu onto it for the time being until I could be bothered to try the download again.

In case any of you care, unlikely I know..... Here are a few notes from the installation of Ubuntu 8.04.  Remember I blogged ages and ages ago about the joak that was OpenSuSE 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10 on this machine?  Well, as I reported then, that was mainly due to apic issues that were causing problems with the 2.6.22 kernel.  So, I expected newer releases would work fine.  I was right too for the most part.  The APIC issues seem to be gone finally. 

In Ubuntu 8.04, there is a new option for running the installer automatically from the live CD.  In previous versions, you'd have to boot the live CD and click on the Icon.  to start the process.  Oh of course, if you were hoping to use a screen reader during the installation, you'd press alt f2, type gnome-terminal, press enter, type sudo su, type orca --no-setup --disable main-window press alt f2 again, type gnome-terminal, yet again, type sudo su to go to root then finally type ubiquity.  The reasons for that are explained in a post a few months ago too.  I was just really quickly running through the process.  Don't worry though, it's simple when you get use to it.

You still have the option of booting the live CD then going into the installation however the new option of booting right into the installation will probably suit most new users. 

When you boot directly into the installer though on the TX 1020, you'll have no sound!  Kind of useless when you depend on a screen reader that outputs to a software synthesizer via your sound card Anyway, I got around that.

If your sighted and your doing this you're not going to have any problems.  After you've finished the installation and  the system reboots you'll have sound and all will be right with the world. 

Even the touch screen works.  You'll have to calibrate it and I'm not entirely sure how that's done yet but I'll find out later.

The only device that doesn't work is the wireless network card.  I'll post instructions for getting that working later.  First I have to figure it out.  The card is recognised and there are no errors found however it doesn't find any wireless networks.  While working with OpenSuSE I noticed this problem on a few of this type of laptop so I'd say it's one of the dodgy modules.  I'll install the NDISWrapper from source and use the Windows driver for this card and that should do the trick. Again though, I'll possibly post instructions up here later when I've done it.

First, before I look at the laptop I've a few things to do here at work.  I'm having an ACL problem with one of the servers.  One the same machine the BAckup Exec agent is giving out so it's going to take me a while to troubleshoot.

I finally got around to destroying my old Linux" server on the TX1020 laptop that was origionally bought for use on trains etc.  In it's place, I installed Vista.  The funny thing though is that this laptop ran for over three and a half months without a single reboot or without being turned off once and it never got as hot as it did while running a simple windows update this morning.  The fan is gone nuts too!  It's making a hell of a lot of noise!  Just goes to show, Vista really is a processor hungry hound.  If this doesn't perform well today I might just consider installing Ubuntu onto it.  Oh.  Actually, on second thought's, I'd like to give Fedora 8 a go so that might do instead.  lthough, I've seen a lot of complaints about F8 so who knows.  Anything has to be better than this though. 

So, the problem is: If I want to use this for one day, I have two choices from a screen reader / accessibility point of view.  I can either run my screen reader, Jaws in 40 minute mode without activating the ILM authorization and reboot every 40 minutes or I can waste another authorization for one day.  You might think to your self, why not just run in 40 minute mode?  ut, you can be almost certain that after that 40 minutes I'll be working on something important and I won't want to reboot.  So, I'll get frustrated with the thing and definitly format it in preparation for the installation of Linux".

What to do What to do! Ah.  I hate Vista.  Linux" is great but it's accessibility is still continually growing.  Don't get me wrong.  I think it's almost equal to Windows at this stage but there are a few annoying areas where it lacks.  So, It's a toss up between performance and accessibility really.  Although, it could be fun getting all the features of this laptop working in Gnome.  I wonder how the touch screen would act.  Hopefully it wouldn't all work out of the box so I can do some messing around. 

OK. time for me to stop writing as I really need to start getting ready for work.

I still like playing with OpenSuSE and when it is launched tomorrow I'll be one of the first to grab it.  I've been using the beta's and even the alfas since they were released.  I've also been part of the development discussions on irc.opensuse.org on the Gnome board so I'm hoping that accessibility will be greatly improved in this release.

I'm blind and therefore don't really need a monitor however on my desk I've three of them.  That's more monitors than anyone else has!

the 19 inch is connected via VGA to the main work PC. 

the 15 inch to my left is connected via DVI to the main work pc creating a dule screen environment. 

the 15 inch to my left is also connected to another machine that is used for accessing another network via a VPN connection.

I've also another machine connected to a monitor on my right that I'm using for testing Windows Vista on this network.  I've also connected this screen via a DVI splitter cable to my main work PC just for a bit of entertainment so I can have three screens connected to my work PC.

I know I don't need them but I've learned a bit more than I knew to start with about video set ups.  I'm also going to install sinergy onto the Vista machine so I can share the one keyboard and mouse across both of them without using a splitter box. 

It's also useful when I ocasionally need to borrow someone's eyes to read a screen for me when I'm doing something with the Bios etc. They've plenty to choose from!

It's funny having a better set up in work than you do at home!

Oh, by the way, I've got XP, Vista and Ubuntu running on my work PC in virtual machines.  I just wanted to install Vista onto another machine to ensure the drivers used were reflective of those needed in a realistic environment.

Earlier, I decided to connect a virtual machine with Ubuntu 8.04 on it to the domain here at work.  This is made much easier in Ubuntu 8.04 however if your domain heavily depends on Wins to provide hostnames then ou may run into problems.  I certainly did anyway.  Finally, by trying the following I seem to have got it working.

1. sudo apt-get update
2. sudo apt-get install likewise-open
3. Go to the system menu, Administration, Network and in the DNS tab, put your domain name in the domain search list. 
4. In /etc/hosts, write the ip address of your domain.  for example: this-domain.local is 192.168.2.100. example: 192.168.2.100 this-domain.local
5. restart the network connection by typing something like /etc/init.d/networking restart
6. type sudo domainjoin-cli join fqdn.of.your.domain Administrator where administrator is a user account with suitable permissions to add a computer to the domain.
7. sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults
8. sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start

I got steps 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8 from the Ubuntu website but finding out why the stupid domain name wouldn't resolve to an IP took some working out.  Mainly because I thought the DNS servers should by default resolve local hostnames as it says it does in this domains specification documentation.

But, there you go.  If you ever get stuck connectin Ubuntu to a domain, try doing a few things manually.  Oh, I tried adding the WINS server to /etc/samba/smb.conf but that made no difference. If you find that works for you though or you have an alternative work around I'd be delighted to hear it.

Emma told me to blog so… here goes.

There’s a lot happening but not much you’ll really be interested in. 

Last weekend, I went down to a good friend of mine in Carlow as his girlfriend organized a surprise for him for his birthday.  The poor fella’s getting old so it was the least I could do. I have to say though, I really enjoyed my self.  I’m spreading things very thin at the moment as I’ve just so much to do but the break last weekend really did me a lot of good.  That is, excluding the lack of sleep I managed to catch up on last weekend.  Because I’m travelling a lot during the week and up at absolutely crazy times in the morning, usually before 6AM, I like to have nothing to get up for during the weekend.  That’s not to say I sit around doing nothing, I just like to wake up when I’m ready as posed to an alarm clock screaming at me at an unmerciful hour.   What can I say! I like my Sleep!  If sleep can’t be had, coffee is very regularly a good replacement.  Oh, I had a great cup of coffee this morning. It was only instant and I made it my self but it just really hit the spot.  Sorry. I’m just rambling.

I’m not playing enough music at all at the moment!  I’ve not played regularly in months.  It’s something I’m going to have to pay more attention to.  I don’t want to let things slide like they did a few years ago.  Music is a very important past time for me and if I don’t keep it up I feel guilty and more importantly, my fingers start to get tight and the ornamentation that I want to use just won’t work!  I’m thinking of going to a few gigs and classes that the pipers club are organizing this weekend, but I really need to do some practice first! I must also get to a few sessions with Maurice Lennon again.  I usually enjoy his music so it might get me motivated again.

On the technical front, I’ve moved away from Linux" somewhat and am now focusing more of my energy on windows 2003 server for my administration needs.  AS YOU CAN SEE FROM MY EARLIER POSTS RELATREGARDING Orca and Ubuntu, I’m still reasonably involved when I get time however as my new job focuses more on the windows side of things I need to prioritise and learn as much about Windows server technologies as possible in a very short space of time.  Would you believe actually, the accessibility of Windows Server technologies is much worse than that provided in Linux"?  With Linux", on my laptop, I had speakup in the console when I was sitting in front of it and when accessing it via SSH, I had access via what ever screen reader I was using.  Essentially, I could SSH to any remote machine and start using it without needing to install any additional assistive software.  Here, where I work now, there are dozens of servers.  All of which I need regular access to.  So, I therefore need to install Jaws onto each one.  I fortunately don’t need to install a full version.  They don’t need servers or anything like that however it’s a real pain none the less!  The servers don’t even have sound cards so I can’t access them with any ease while standing in front of them.  The best thing I can do is take a laptop around with me to remote desktop into them.  That’s basically what I’m doing at the moment anyway.

At home, I’ve decommissioned my Linux" server and in its place I’ve installed a shiny new Windows 2003 SBS operating system complete with Exchange 2003, IIS, Sharepoint, and all that other stuff. I have to say, although it’s exceptionally easy to set up, I’m not overly impressed with its flexibility.  In Linux", I had things set up really well, customized to meet the needs of my self and Emma.  We both had different set ups because we both have different requirements.  In Exchange, there’s a standard way of doing things and if you want to go outside that, exchange is no longer your friend.  In saying that, there’s certainly a reason why it’s so popular.  That is, anyone who’s got any experience with Windows conventions can set it up.  If you know that right clicking on absolutely everything will get you a lot of options, you’re going to be able to set it up.

On the work side of things, I’m still really enjoying my self.  I’m still having problems with remote access, a topic I think I wrote about last week or the week before but accessibility related problems are slowly but surely getting a bit easier to handle.  My main thing at the moment is finding an alternative way of reading bar codes for all these tapes I’m managing.  There are six very active tape servers at the moment and labels for each tape.  Each server takes a minimum of twelve tapes with a maximum of 24.  That’s a lot of labels!  Backup Exec, the application that we use for managing these backups will give the bar codes when a tape has been processed but that’s far from an efficient way of obtaining that information. So, I’m on the hunt for a more accessible solution.

OH, on the Linux" accessibility side of things, I’ll be working on another few recordings soon so if your interested, stay tuned.  If your not, you should be!  Linux" is the future!  It’s coming and there’s no escaping it!

This process is not very difficult however I've been as descriptive here as possible to allow users who have listened to my configuring Orca in Ubuntu 8.04 walk through to access these commands in a more friendly format.

1. Go into a terminal. Press alt + F2, type gnome-terminal then press enter.
2. at the command prompt: ($) use the su command to change to the root user.
3. Firstly, install an easy to use text editor such as Nano / Pico.
   

   apt-get install nano

   
   If nano is not found, replace this with pico. These are escentially the same editors just different versions.
4. Create a .orbitrc file in your /root directory by typing the following:
   

   nano /root/.orbitrc

5. Insert the following two lines into this file:
   

   ORBIIOPIPv4=1
   ORBIIOPUNIX=0

6. Save and exit this file. First press the key stroke: Control + x. When asked for the file name you want to save this as just press enter. Then press Control + C.
7. Change the permissions on this file so that only the root user can read and write to this file and the root group and all other users and groups can read it.
   

   chmod 644 /root/.orbitrc

8. Turning our attention to /etc/sudoers, first allow write access to this file.
   

   chmod 777 /etc/sudoers

9. Edit this file using nano by typing:
   

   nano /etc/sudoers

10. Arrow down to the line containing the words: "env_reset". Just after this line, insert the text below:
    

    Defaults env_keep+="GTK_MODULES"

11. Save and exit the file. Control + x, hit enter to accept the name /etc/sudoers. Hit control plluss c to quit.
12. Change the permissions on this file again to secure it against attacks on your system using the following command:
    

    chmod 440 /etc/sudoers

13. type exit to return to your own user account.
14. Change to your home directory by typing:
    

    cd

15. Create another .orbitrc file:
    

    nano .orbitrc

16. Insert the following two lines into this file:
    

    ORBIIOPIPv4=1
    ORBIIOPUNIX=0

17. Save and exit this file. First press the key stroke: Control + x. When asked for the file name you want to save this as just press enter. Then press Control + C.
18. Change the permissions on this file so that only you can read and write to this file and the users group and all other users and groups can read it.
    

    chmod 644 .orbitrc

19. Exit the terminal window by typing the exit command.
20. Log out of your session. Press alt f1, Press the right arrow twice, press up to quit then enter. Alt and l will activate the log out button or alternatively, tab over to it and press enter.
21. When you log in again, access an administration tool such as software sources by doing the following:
22. Press alt f2 and type gnome-terminal then hit enter.
23. Change to the root account by typing su then hit enter
24. Restart orca with root privlidges:
    

    orca --no-setup --disable main-window

25. Orca will start and welcome you however will not speak yet. Press alt f1, left once, down twice, right once then up seven times to software sources and press enter. (Confused? ) Don't be. it's something you'll ge tuse to.
26. You will be prompted for your password. Type the same password as you used to log into the system.
27. You should now recieve feedback from orca.
28. To start orca normally again, press Alt+F2 and tyetype orca in the launch application dialogue box.

If you have problems hearing sound output after installing Ubuntu or any other distribution that contains the alsamixer, try the following:

1. Enter a terminal. Use the run dialogue box by pressing Alt+F then type gnome-terminal, or alternatively, press alt + F1 to enter the top menu bar, arrow down through the applications menu to accessories, press the right arrow then arrow up to terminal and press enter.
2. If you have followed the instructions for Linux".aspx">changing your root password, change to root by typing the su command.
3. Start the alsa mixer by typing
   

   alsamixer

   
   at the command prompt.
4. At this point, you are in a text based volume control window. Use up and down arrows to increase and decrease the volume respectively and use the right and left arrows to move through the different volume settings. Example: speakers, mike, cd, wav etc. If you have very low sound output, hold down the up arrow for a few seconds on each control. Press the right key to move to the next slider then hold the up arrow again. Do this a few times.
5. To exit the alsamixer, press the escape key twice.
6. Exit the terminal by typing exit twice. Remember, you type exit once to leave the root account then exit again to close the terminal window.

I don't doubt there is a better and more accessible way of fixing this type of issue however this has never failed me so it's worth listing.

Changing your root password in Linux" is very easy. Follow the below instructions:

1. Start the gnome terminal. Press Alt F2 to start the run dialogue box and type gnome-terminal then press enter.
2. In the terminal, type
   

   sudo passwd root

   
   then press enter.
3. You will be prompted to enter a new password twice. Tyep this password and press return.
4. You can now elivate your permissions by typing the su command at the command prompt.

Note: When logged in on a terminal / console as a user, you will see a $ sign on the prompt. If you are logged in as root, this $ sign will change to a #.

To check who you are logged in as on the console / terminal, type the command:

whoami

The second in this series of recordings for the Ubuntu 8.04 Linux" distribution is now available.  This recording will guide you through configuring Orca via the Orca preferences window, Updating Orca via SVN, Configuring Orca to provide access to administration tools, the Software sources window where you can select or deselect software repositories and finally updating Ubuntu 8.04 via apt-get.   The recording is available at www.digitaldarragh.com/linux/configuring-orca.mp3 and as always, you'll find this and all other recordings at www.digitaldarragh.com/linuxat.asp  Enjoy and let me know what you think.

After a lot of talking about wanting to do another recording, I’ve finally got around to doing it! Over the last few days I’ve been getting things ready.  Last night I finished it and uploaded it to the web server.

This recording will walk you right through the installation of Ubuntu 8.04 with screen reader support right from the start.  It also begins to describe the installed system and skims over web accessibility with the Firefox web browser.

The audio file is available at http://www.digitaldarragh.com/linux/installing-ubuntu-8-04-with-orca.mp3  Of course, like before you can access and previous recordings at www.digitaldarragh.com/linuxat.asp

All your comments and suggestions are welcome by email at d@digitaldarragh.com or via commenting to this post.

Part two of this installation detailing the configuration of the system will be released soon.

Greetings all,

I just thought it would be a good idea to write a few words on this tonight because as I now have y self fully up and running in the new house, I’ll be doing a few more audio recordings.  I’ve just tested out some new cables that I got a few months ago that had been sitting waiting to be used and the quality that I get from them is just absolutely fantastic.   I had planned to do another audio review of Orca with the new Ubuntu 8.04 however I decided to leave it until tomorrow evening so I have some more time to prepare my self.  I’ll also listen back over the review and other recordings I did the last time I undertook this type of project to give me a few ideas. 

Oh, I couldn’t put into words how fantastic it is to have my nice big powerful desktop back up and running.  The responsiveness of the entire system is just excellent.  Now, if the sound card works reliably this time it will be even better again.  Oh, that’s right. The Blog hadn’t been born when I bought this PC.  Well, in short, I bought this computer back in August.  It cost me an absolute fortune!  I got it within about four days which was really cool but very shortly after turning it on I found that the sound card wasn’t behaving as it should.  I got it with a SBXVI platinum card so it has loads of bells and whistles but the stupid card didn’t work correctly.  I originally thought it was a Vista problem and the manufacturer of the PC didn’t disagree with this assumption.  However, after a few months of digging around, I found that it was actually a defective machine.  After some messing around and a lot of shouting and complaining, I finally got the machine sent back.  It was sent back to me in December however I haven’t had a change to even turn it back on until tonight!  I’m really relieved to see that it’s all working as it’s supposed to.  Touch wood anyway that it doesn’t start acting up again.  From what I can tell, they’ve replaced the sound card and the motherboard. 

OH, they also removed one of the power cables connecting the second Sata hard disk so I’m going to have to find one of those.  I’d ask them to send me a replacement but its more hassle than it’s worth.  It will only take me a few minutes to connect it up again.  I took the second drive out when I was sending it back as I had been using that to store files and music and I didn’t want it to be formatted on me.

That’s all for now.  If I feel like it tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the absolutely fantastic weekend I’ve just had.  It’s a real shame it’s over!  I want another few days off!

We're getting close! 

My installation of Ubuntu 8.04 didn't go too well as you'll see in an earlier post but I'm still really looking forward to the released version in a few days.  I'll be surprised if they don't fix the orca related bug.

God it's been such a busy weekend I'll be glad to start the week again.

I have stuff to blog about regarding the house but this post is about technology only.  I'd great plans this weekend.  I have Windows 2003 Small Business server here on CD waiting to be installed so I was looking forward to getting stuck in this weekend!  Instead though, my internet connection went down on Saturday morning for absolutely no reason.  Looks like my router took a panic attack and just decided for its own strange reasons not to work anymore.  After a lucky guess, I found out how to restore it to its factory defaults but that means of course that I have to start the configuration of it all over
again. 

Now, as you may or may not know, this set up here in the house is:  two or more CAT 5E network points in each room meeting under the stairs.  The server takes care of DHCP, I.E, providing IP addresses, mail, processing mail rules etc.  It's also the mail and FTP server and does a few other nice little things like accesses the networks firewall and all that kind of good stuff. 

Anyway, back to my internet problem.  After messing around with it for a while, I called BT to see if there was some problem in my area.  They said that it looked like I wasn't connected but they had no idea as to why this may be.  "Very helpful weren't they?" Anyway, I kept looking around but during this research my router suddenly died and wouldn't even let me ping it.  There was absolutely no reason why this would just stop all of a sudden. So, after trying to revive it, last night, I decided to restore it to factory defaults.  I found a reset button that was well recessed but that just reboots it.  By chance, I thought of holding it in for a few minutes.  Still nothing.  So, I pulled the plug for about the tenth time and bingo, it booted up into its factory defaults so I could start the long job of reconfiguring it again.

Still though, after configuring the internet, it wouldn't work.

Then, as suddenly as it stopped it started again.

Feeling absolutely thrilled, I reconnected the server to the network.  Oh, I forgot to say, I disconnected it while reconfiguring the router temporarily to decrease the complexity of the configuration at the start.  The less complicated the set up, the less complicated the solution usually.

For some reason though, the internet connection went down again.  No, it wasn't the server causing the problem.  I was checking the status of the internet via the telnet connection to the router.

I set up one port in my computer room to bypass the server while I was trying to configure the router so I could disable different daemons on the Linux" machine during the process.

After more messing around, the internet connections seems to have stabilized.  I'm not certain if this is due to my troubleshooting or some strange BT fandom. Either way, it's been up for at least twenty minutes now and hopefully it will stay that way. 
Problem was though at the end that the machine connected to the direct connection to the router with a static IP and DNS entries could ping out to the Internet but the server still couldn't. 

I checked the network settings on the server to find that there were actually static DNS servers defined for the network card that was facing the Internet.  I set one DNS address to point to the router and one to itself because I want client PC's to access the server internally without typing the IP address for mail etc.

That's seems to have done it for the moment.  I've gone around in circles twice or more this weekend trying to solve that blasted problem.  I've still no idea how it started! Stupid BT just doesn’t have a clue either.  Their absolutely no use. 

Now, I'm going for a pint.  Want to join me?  After the weekend I've just had, I need one!

I think this is definitly important enough to deserve a mention on my small corner of the WWW.

Blacknight, a hosting and colocation provider in Ireland are in the process of launching a number of really cool new services.  Or so it says on the official Blacknight blog anyway...

The latest service they have announced is VPS.  Virtual Private Servers.  Basically this is a server that you have full control over.  If you have custom requirements that are not met by a shared server but you don't have the money for a dedicated box then in my opinion this is probably the best way to go.   For me, it's great.  If they eventually provide an OpenSuSE installation it could easily take over the work that my home server is doing.  I.e, it could act as my email and web server while still giving me the control that I want.  Go learn more about it over at http://www.blacknightvps.com/

Enabling all the usual repositories and updating the entire system using apt-get has made no obvious difference to the issue I reported in my previous post.  Orca is still unable to provide access to applications that require higher privlidges i.e, applications that must be run as root / super user. I even updated to the latest Orca 2.22 version from SVN. Still nothing has really changed.  I'm going to play around with the rest of the system though in a while to see if there are any major improvements.  I do like that Firefox beta 4 is included in this version of Ubuntu though.  It's nice not to have to go hunting for the url to the nightly build for a change after installing a fresh version.

Now, for my next decision:  Last time, just for something to do, I configured the Windows vista boot loader to provide the choice to boot either windows or Linux". This time, obviously, when I installed Ubuntu, the boot loader has returned to grub.  Mainly, because I didn't bother not selecting it to install onto /dev/sdb during the installation so by default, it installed onto the first sector of the primary drive. I've just reconfigured the menu.lst for grub to change the options to suit me a bit so really, I could live with either grub or the windows boot loader at the moment.  I think I'll look at ways of tweeking grub for a bit of entertainment and stick with that at the moment.  In comparason, the windows boot loader is very simple and doesn't provide a lot of functionality.  It would be cool if I could get grub to look different or make a sound. 

I use to be able to configure lilo, the boot loader that was used primarily in Linux" before Grub took the lead to beep when I arrowed over certain list items however I don't think that's so straight forward in Grub. 

Anyway, I'm off to play with Linux" for a while.  Talk to you soon.

The installation has completed successfully and Ubuntu 8.04 is now up and running.  That was quick wasn’t it?  In that time as well, I also took a 45 minute break, took care of an escalated case and read a bit about the new features of this latest version of the Ubuntu distribution.

The first thing that I noticed when I started the live CD was that Orca would not speak when run as root.  This meant that I didn’t have access to a screen reader during the installation.  Fortunately though, Emma read the screen for me so we kept going through to see what happened.

After the installation, I’ve found that Orca is still not working properly when it’s run as root however I’ve just run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade a moment or two ago and I was amazed at the amount of packages that need to be updated.  I suppose, that’s what you get with using a downloaded beta 3 of the ISO. Either way though, I’m happy so far.  This is probably a minor issue that will hopefully get sorted out before the released product sometime this month.

I’ll keep you posted after apt-get has finished updating the installed packages.  If that doesn’t work, I’ll download the latest 2.22 branch of orca from SVN.

The improvements in 8.04 are listed on www.ubuntu.com so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here by listing them all.  Put it like this.  It's now using gnome 2.22 and therefore benefits from all that provides.  I read a site a few days ago that called October and April Ubuntu months.  I think that's a very accurate description.  Since I saw the changes between 7.04 and 7.10 I've really been looking forward to 8.04 to see what that had to offer.  In my opinion, Ubuntu constantly raises the bar with every release.  Don't get me wrong.  There are other distributions out there doing equally great work such as OpenSuSE, Fedora and Mandriva but Ubuntu has targeted it's self as being a really user focused and friendly distribution and I think it's doing that job very well.

I decided to update to the latest beta yesterday. Things didn't really go as planned though.  running update-manager --devel-release worked, I checked for updates, found the latest release of 8.04 and clicked upgrade.  the process started however didn't get past the first stage.  It freezes at preparing repositories. 

The same thing interestingly happened me when upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10 so I just decided to do a fresh install in the end.  That's what I'm going to do this time as well.  Mainly because no matter what happens, I prefer to do a fresh install on a machine that I rely on as heavily as I do my laptop.

This morning, I've downloaded the ISO for 8.04 Beta 3 and I'm just in the process of backing up my files before doing the fresh install.  I'll let you know how I get on.  I'll be looking at it from an accessibility perspective mainly.  Hopefully everything will install as quickly as in 7.10. 

See you on the other side.

Google’s services seem to have been down this morning and from around 4PM yesterday.  On the BT connection that my server lives on, I couldn’t ping or traceroute google.com or gmail.com.  I originally thought it was something that had gone wrong with the server that was causing the problem but after an hour or two of messing around I gave up.  I posted a question to the Irish Linux" Users Group this morning and almost straight away I got three responses telling me that it was likely that I was experiencing problems due to a larger Google connectivity issue that was affecting some people.  BT did the daily IP address change about a half an hour ago and since then all has worked fine again.

Very Very strange.  I hope that doesn’t happen again.  I’ve had three months of flawless up time on that server and I don’t want to have to even look at it for another three months.  It’s exactly what a server should be.  A forgotten computer tucked away out of sight.

Sometimes I find technical support really entertaining!  I'm taking calls today because I felt like it this morning.  I don't need to ordinarily unless we're really short staffed but I'm in a helpfull mood today.

This fella just called asking me two questions.

1.  What is the second DVD needed for? Genuine enough I suppose.  It's used for installing source packages in OpenSuSE 10.3.  Well, specifically, not only source packages but packages used for the development or server side of things.  Most consumer packages are located on the first DVD so as to ensure users don't unnecessarily need to change DVD during the installation.

2.  Where do you change the photo that is shown on the log in screen in the latest version of OpenSuSE.  Fortunately, he was using Gnome but he was using the really flashy search centered menu that openSuSE have created.  I always use the traditional Gnome menu so to answer his question I had to enable this.  He found it very funny though.  He was a nice bloke and although the call only lasted about five or so minutes, it was entertaining!  It's nice when you get friendly people.

I hope I get a few really technical questions today.  I want a bit of a challenge.

I've to go activate his product now.  The new registration and activation process is slightly complicated.  It's not something we'd ordinarily do but he was a nice bloke so I'll do it for him.

As someone I know said lately, you'll catch more bees with honey.  It's true I suppose. 

Out of curiosity and some bordum this evening, I decided to figure out how to get the TV card that comes with the HP Pavilian DV8396EA laptop to work with Windows Vista.  When this was shipped, Vista hadn't been released yet so it came with XP.  Since then, I've installed Vista Ultomit and most of the drivers necessary for the machine to behave normaly. The only driver I haven't spent time on was the TV tuner card.  It didn't look like there was a driver available for it that would work under Windows Vista.

I did some looking around and found that they still included this card in the DV9022EA laptop that came with Windows Vista 32BIT so I used the download page for this notebook to get the driver.  Believe me, it wasn't as easy as it sounds.  The address to that page is: