Sunday 5 April 2009

A Tale of Three Synthesizers and Five Languages!


The next release of Vinux will hopefully support several European languages including Spanish, French, German and Dutch/Flemish and will therefore be called Vinux.eu! The user will be able to choose what language they want to use on the Live CD by entering a short cheatcode at the boot prompt and/or a specific username and password at the login screen. This depends upon whether or not I can let the user choose a language, keyboard layout and Orca voice by entering a cheatcode at the boot prompt or whether I am going to have to create either a different user account for each language or even a different iso image. This is because at the moment, while I can get the display language to change I cannot get the keyboard layout or Orca voice to change via cheatcodes. Although, these can easily be changed via the keyboard and Orca preferences windows after boot the system defaults to English after an install and requires you to change the language and keyboard settings manually again. If I can't resolve this though cheatcodes then I will experiment with creating multiple user accounts, although that might not be possible using the Remastersys 'dist' mode which would mean forcing users to change the password manually after an install! Other new features that I hope to include are the Emacspeak Audio Desktop using the lightweight Eflite speech synthesier for more experienced users, the LinuxSpeaks menu based console screen-reader using the Espeak speech synthesiser for beginners and the reconfiguration of YASR to use the Festival speech synthesizer, thus providing a higher quality console based screen-reading experience.