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

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 11:08:26PM +0100, Saqib Shaikh wrote:
> 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.
> 

This is all well and good. However, one of my personal objections to
getting an Elba is that as far as I know, they don't have a voice-only
model without the braille display. So the way I see it, I dish out a
couple thousand dollars more for a braille display which I may not
want, or convince them to believe me that I don't want a braille
display, and sell me a unit for a lower price as a result, even though
it would still include the braille display.

I've also heard that the Elba comes in a somewhat heavy aluminum
case. If this is so, then it would certainly be more convenient to carry
around a lighter braillenote/voice note with a plastic case, running gnu/linux,
then it would be to carry a heavier Elba in a metal case.

Also, the fact remains that there are still people with braillenotes
or pac mates, who want to run gnu/linux on that device. So, should
they or their rehab agencies dish out another several thousand
dollars for an Elba, simply because there is no way to run gnu/linux
on the device they currently have? 

In short, while it is good that the Elba is out there, it isn't a
solution for everyone.

Greg

P.S. I'm glad to see the list liven up this way (smile).

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