Time to branch: was RE: Linux on the PK?

[Saqib Shaikh]

Hi All

It occurs to me that there are broadly speaking two different types of
people on this list:
1.  Those who find it annoying that they can't have a feature unless
manufacturer supplies it.
2.  Those for whom the freedom to modify, tinker etc is a necessary part of
any product.

Of course I'm overgeneralising, but this is only to serve a purpose.

I believe that for the first broad category of people being able to write
software for the Pacmate, and being able to soon write software for the
BrailleNote, their thirst for inovation will be quenched and they will be
able to write, for example, a better email client that has authenticated
SMTP, or a PDF reader or an address book which can connect to LDAP servers.
Of course these applications could be made open source and fuel future
contributions and growth.

But there are other people who will not be satisfied with such a solution.
Such people will feel that unless they can get access to all the software,
down to the lowest level components, they will not have true control and
freedom.  This is an admirable goal, but certainly much harder to achieve.
For such people efforts at hacking the Pacmate or Braillenote are going to
be hindered and complicated by lack of information and incomplete parts of
the kernel.  So, rather than struggling on in this direction I agree with
Sebby that the Elba is the way forward.

This is a device with either braille or qwerty input, and braille display
and speech output.  You should probably choose braille input since the
device is smaller, and there is a PS2 port for a normal keyboard - the best
of both worlds.  Inside the machine you have pretty standard components
including an ARM processor, etc.  As Sebby said, it is running Debian for
the ARM architecture, and by default all the hardware must be supported.

On the software side you have Pine for email, Pico for text editing, I
believe a front end to MPG123 or similar for media player, Lynx for web
browsing, Bash for terminal (optionally with a root password), CatDoc for
opening MSWord files, etc etc etc.  On top of this as Sebby said is
Eloquence, with a closed-source screen reader (that you could replace with
BrlTTY if you so wished).  The device has normal serial parallel and
ethernet ports (and many other ports besides).  So in theory you could add
Samba to this and browse windows networks.

But the most important thing is that this was all written by a very small
group of German hackers from Papenmire.  If you offered your help they may
well be willing to give you some help and be willing to take your work back
into the shipping product.

So, I'd be interested to know what people thought of moving to this
platform.

Saqib