Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[mcewanw]

[djringjr]

A simple menu would help people like who can't remember commands like me. Believe me it is a regal discomfort in the posterior (RPITA) to hunt through helpful documentation to find the command you need, then hunt through pages more until you find what you need to do after the first command. Usually I have forgotten the first command when I find the second.

Use Occam's Razor - anything that is excessive and complicates things is removed! On the other hand, you can't over simplify and be guilty of Reductionism. (example: You can write a book on tomatoes that is 200 pages long, or you can say that a tomato is a "thing", or you can give a short succinct description: A red globe shaped fruit ranging from 1 inch to 4 inches in diameter which grows in termperate climates which is often eaten cold or cooked and often made into sauces.

This later gives 99 per cent of the information anyne will likely need. I call this the magic of Puppy Linux - because when you cut the 200 page book out, the computer runs faster, and things get done faster. Amazing. Gone is the Bloat!

Back to the menu system - applying Puppy's "Occam's Razor" and cutting out the fat:

B for browse, "Enter web address starting with h t t p colon slant slant and then press enter"

M for mail: "Do you want to read your e mail? Press R. Do you want to write e mail, then press S.

W for write. This will open a simple editor the command to quit is XXX and the command to save is XXX. The command to open a document is XXX. The command to read your saved files is XXX.

P is for play. You can play mp3 and other recordings by pressing P. (Submenu) To open your music library, press P then L. Use down arrow to read the titles. When you have the one you want, press ENTER. If you want to play from a web stream press B then type in the web address starting with h t t p colon slant slant

R is for Record. Press R and start recording, press ESCape to stop recording.

A is for Advanced. If you press A you will be taken to advanced programs such as emacs, etc.

C is for calculator - it will perform calculations. (submenu) Press C for regular calculator, or press M for a money calculator which makes a record of your entries and stores the account balance so you can balance your cheque book. (Submenu for C - enter the figures then press + for addition, - for subtraction, / for division, * for multiplication.) (Submenu for M: Scroll down with down cursor key to the account and press ENTER access the records.
2nd Submenu for M: For balance press B, to enter a cheque press C, to enter a deposit. You will hear the numbers as you enter them, press ENTER and you will hear the number followed by "checque" or "deposit", if you believe it is wrong, press the ESCappe key, if it is correct press ENTER.

Press O for optical character recognition. Have you book or letter on the scanner then press ENTER to scan it.

Press V for Voice Recognition, then press ENTER to begin with the microphone, or press P to play a recorded file, use up and down cursor arrows to select, and ENTER to play and recognize.

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

If a PC that had speech recognition, command line interface as we now have it with this type of menu system, and OCR for scanning printed documents so they could be saved to a text file so they could be "read" by the vision impaired and blind people, and it could be put into a eeSus PC 1 pound notebook (but with better battery). Solid state drive, reasonable CPU, reasonable memory, wireless connectivity/ethernet/modem, make the computer very flat and measure slightly bigger than an A4 (8-1/2 by 11 USA) size with a keyboard on top which can be removed, then revealing a scanner with a swing open lid so it can scan,, and then sell for $200 it would be a fabulous success. Price too low? Remember this unit doesn't need a video display, Without video and the use of a capacitive array (no motor) scanner, the current drain would be a few watts or less. Omit the scanner, and have a design which is a folding keyboard, and you have a "Brain in a Billfold" computer or a Green PC that talks, writes and reads! Sure beats an mp3 player for use.

Can you imagine what this could do for the welfare of people with vision problems?

Best

David

=30=

[mcewanw]

I finally tried sending an email from edbrowse.

First, before starting edbrowse, I loaded /root/.ebrc
into a text editor and filled in my own email details (including the servers of my ISP) instead of these ones provided as dummy fields by Karl Dahlke:

mail {
default
# The pop3 server and the smtp server, they need not be the same. I changed the following to my isp mail servers and so on:
inserver = mail.comcast.net
outserver = smtp.comcast.net
# login and password
login = kdahlke189603
password = elephant
from = Karl Dahlke
reply = kdahlke189603@comcast.net
}

Note that this was the first mail account listed in the /root/.ebrc file, and I inserted the word "default" to signify it was my default account. (I erased the word default from the second mail account, since you can only have one default account).

Then I started edbrowse, and following the edbrowse usersguid I composed a message in the editor (using a for append, and fullstop on a line by its own to finish editing), as follows:

a
To: johndoesomebody@hotmail.com
Subject: Just a test email
Hi, this is a test edbrowse email.
.
sm

missing : in address book line 1

It didn't work, the above line is the error. So I opened up the address book in an editor. The file in question, in fokSyf Eye R at least, is:
/root/.edbrowse/outside/adbook

It had an email address in it, sitting on its own. That is wrong. Entries in the address book should have the form:

Fred : fredblogs@gmailly.com

where the first field is an alias to be associated with the email address entry.

and not simply:

fredblogs@gmailly.com

For my test, I just deleted the offending line and re-saved the address book and restarted edbrowse. This time there was no error message when I entered sm and the message was sent...

I haven't tried receiving (pop3) email yet.

[mcewanw]

I'm going to have to add an extra menu item to foksy for fetching mail with edbrowse.

It can send mail, using sm, as it is, but not fetch it;
a -mx option needs to be added to the edbrowse commandline.

[Trobin]

[Trobin]

One thing I would not want to do is listen to a long document for the commands I wish to use. What I would want is a help file that is short, to the point, listing only the commands needed for the task I wish to perform.

[djringjr]

I agree with you Trobin, a simple help file - a "Quick Start" and "Quick Help" menu.

Exactly the information you need organized well.

We've talked about the main documentation - and we agree especially for people using the screen reader, it should be broken up into tiers.

For editing command, press E
for movement and reading commands press M
for configuration commands press C

Basically it is an index system for anyone using a screen reader. Just like we with sight visually scan a big long page, or use "search" (which they could do also but they might not find the correct section while the sighted can immediately know it isn't the right place).

It would benefit both types of users - it is one of the things I appreciated with library science - the ordering of information is an often under appreciated ability.

Best

David

[mcewanw]

[Trobin]

I was thinking about some thing along the line of:

[mcewanw]

sorry, accidental double post as I was editing this one.

[mcewanw]

[Trobin]

I have officially finished trying to get Finch, the command line version of Pidgin, working on my computer. I figured tht with the new pidgin-2.4.0 pet file it just might work. So I down loaded it and tried it. I got some life out of Finch, this time, but it was looking for a lot of lib files. The same as Pidgin.

i compiled pidgin 2.4.0 from source, and the finch executable didn't get created. let alone saved to /usr/local/bin. Nor can pfind find it anywhere.

Pidgin works fine though.

So the heck with Pidgin/Finch. There are other solutions for a chat programs. Irssi may not allow one to chat over multiple systems, but it's a start.

[Trobin]

I was having a bit of trounle configuring Centericq, and looked around for other solutions. There is a program called BitlBee that acts as a gateway between an irc client, such as Irssi, which I know works, and AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN and YIM.

You have a choice of running BitlBee on your own computer or using Irssi to connect to a public BitlBee server. Most of them appear to be in Europe. Skype may be added in version 1.11

http://en.linuxreviews.org/Bitlbee#How_it_works

[Trobin]

Okay. bitlbee needs some sort of SSL library to work. I'll look into that later.


However I was able to use Irssi to connect to im.bitlbee.org.

[Trobin]

Nuts. I just spent an hour trying to get Bitlbee working on my computer. Didn't even get close.

It needed an ssl library. The message mentioned open.ssl. So I downloaded and installed openssl. Tried to reconfigure BitlBee. Got the same message. So I tried Gnutls. It needed something called libgcrypt. Search for it on the internet, down load it, try to install it. Guess what, it needs libgpg-error. Okay, back to the Internet find it, download it, install it. No problem, installs without a flaw. Go back to libcrypt and try to compile it again. Got two configure errors.