Vinux 1.5 is now available for download and testing by members of the Vinux Development Forum. If no serious bugs are found in the next few days then I will post a public release announcement on other mailing lists etc. New features include: Speech-Dispatcher as the default speech server, YASR configured to use the Festival speech synthesiser, New shortcuts to start/kill Speech-Dispatcher (ctrl+shift+s and ctrl+shift+k), Orca weather keystroke (insert+w) set to Birmingham UK (UKXX0018), Larger fonts and higher contrast theme by default, Installation of the Firefox Accessibar plugin, Mousekeys enabled by default, Gedit's advanced plugins enabled by default and the Medibuntu repository enabled by default. I have not yet implemented all of the features I wanted to include in this release. I have fitted as many features as I could on a CD sized image, but I could not fit on Emacspeak, LinuxSpeaks or support for foreign languages etc., in a 700MB image. I hope to release a 'Vinux 1.5 Plus' edition shortly which will contain both of these extra accessibility packages, support for foreign languages and some more multimedia codecs etc. However this will obviously be larger than 700MB and will have to be burnt on to a DVD. Vinux 1.5 will probably be the last release of Vinux based on Ubuntu as there are too many bugs in the latest release and their rapid and cutting edge release cycle means that it is not really a suitable base for creating a stable accessible distribution. So once I have released 'Vinux 1.5 Plus' I am planning to switch to Debian as a base. I believe this will provide a much more stable platform in the long term.
Sunday 24 May 2009
Vinux 1.5: Better Late Than Never!
Vinux 1.5 is now available for download and testing by members of the Vinux Development Forum. If no serious bugs are found in the next few days then I will post a public release announcement on other mailing lists etc. New features include: Speech-Dispatcher as the default speech server, YASR configured to use the Festival speech synthesiser, New shortcuts to start/kill Speech-Dispatcher (ctrl+shift+s and ctrl+shift+k), Orca weather keystroke (insert+w) set to Birmingham UK (UKXX0018), Larger fonts and higher contrast theme by default, Installation of the Firefox Accessibar plugin, Mousekeys enabled by default, Gedit's advanced plugins enabled by default and the Medibuntu repository enabled by default. I have not yet implemented all of the features I wanted to include in this release. I have fitted as many features as I could on a CD sized image, but I could not fit on Emacspeak, LinuxSpeaks or support for foreign languages etc., in a 700MB image. I hope to release a 'Vinux 1.5 Plus' edition shortly which will contain both of these extra accessibility packages, support for foreign languages and some more multimedia codecs etc. However this will obviously be larger than 700MB and will have to be burnt on to a DVD. Vinux 1.5 will probably be the last release of Vinux based on Ubuntu as there are too many bugs in the latest release and their rapid and cutting edge release cycle means that it is not really a suitable base for creating a stable accessible distribution. So once I have released 'Vinux 1.5 Plus' I am planning to switch to Debian as a base. I believe this will provide a much more stable platform in the long term.
