I am currently feeling very frustrated, having spent nearly every waking hour since the release of Vinux 1.2 (as well as regularly dreaming about it in between) and have really not made any significant progress as yet! I have managed to solve a few small issues like being able to choose your own username and password when you install it, being able to use the built in USB installer to create a bootable pendrive Vinux with persistent storage and installing YASR. However I have made no progress at all with the more significant issues such as installing and configuring speech-dispatcher with Alsa (without losing multi-channel sound capabilities), enabling multi-language and keyboard support or getting LinuxSpeaks to integrate into the system without causing problems. I could release a Vinux 1.21 version but I don't really feel that it is worth releasing a completely new version with such insignificant changes as it is easy enough to install and configure YASR after installation and change your password, and I don't think that many people are that desperate for bootable USB pendrives.
So I have decided to take a short break from Vinux (maybe a couple of weeks) and just experiment with other distros as a starting point (possibly Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE or PCLinuxOS) as well as taking a closer look at other specialised VI distributions such as Adriane Knoppix, BlindUbuntu and GRML etc., to see what I can learn from them. I am still sincerely committed to the goal of creating a fully accessible easy to use distribution that Visually Impaired users who have never used Linux before can just boot and experiment with. I just need a short break to rethink my approach and take the pressure off myself for a bit. In the words of the Terminator "I'll be back!"
