[Autistic] intro

[Nick Leverton]

On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 04:10:57PM -0500, Amanda wrote:
> I'm Amanda, some may know me from elsewhere, I help run autistics.org and so 
> forth.

Hi Amanda, really pleased to see you here :)

> I'm currently running Ubuntu on the desktop, although I'd like to know if 
> there's a Debian-based distribution that is not as hard to configure as 
> Debian and not as do-everything-for-you-in-maddening-ways as Ubuntu.  Some 
> middle ground.

Not sure what you consider maddening about Ubuntu.  AFAIK (being basically
an up-to-date version of Debian) it does no additional configuration
at all beyond the very little Debian does, and Debian's is limited to
asking you a small number of important questions and editing your config
files for you - the configs all being documented in man pages.

Compare this with Mdk's "we're gonna trash your config files, cos we've
updated and you didn't fill in our form last time you edited them",
or Red Hat "if we haven't written a tool for it, you're on your own
even finding how we interpret the config file".

I have had an RH home desktop for about 1 year, a Mandrake home desktop
for about 1 week (twice, stupid I am), a Debian home desktop for about 6
years and counting, an RH work machine for 2 years, and an Ubuntu work
machine for 6 months and counting - so I do have a fair experience of
using them.

> On the laptop (a Dell Inspiron 7000), after every Debian-based distribution 
> seemed to fail to recognize its CD-ROM drive, we tried Gentoo.  I still want 
> to go further with that, but various circumstances have meant that I use the 
> laptop as a communication system, so getting it up fast became a priority, 
> hence a lot of headache with Fedora, which at least seemed to recognize most 
> things.  (Except the sound card, still working on that.)

Installers are difficult to write as they are always limited by what
you can load from the initial boot.  I use live CDs to determine whether
hardware is basically workable.  Does a Knoppix or Ubuntu-live CD drive
your sound ?  If so it should be quite easy to get it going, and I could
help for Debian based systems.

> Plus my brain hasn't worked as well in some ways since neuroleptics, so I 
> haven't made as much progress learning linux as I've wanted.  I'm not as good 
> with computers as a professional but a lot better with them than the average 
> layperson, mostly figured out by fiddling with them.

Often the best way to find out :)

> This has meant that I've been reluctant to get into the Linux community in 
> general, because I'm afraid I'll get branded as a stupid newbie asking easy 
> questions and so forth, since some of the things I don't know are quite basic 
> (but some of the things I do know are far from basic, so there's no simple 
> categorization here).  So I'm glad to see a place where anything from the 
> really easy to the really hard is welcomed and people aren't treated harshly 
> for it.

The only thing I hate is people who treat *me* as stupid because *they*
can't imagine that I know something they don't ...

> I've been running since I got my own computer, which was 1999.  And I'm really 
> happy to be doing so, particularly because it lets me know what's going on 
> when I want to know, and it's very customizable.  I wish there were better 
> speech output programs though.

Sammi is interested in speech output for AC people with difficulty
reading.  So far I've got KDE to read out error messages, and to speak
a web page on demand.  But the software (Festival based) isn't very
intuitive, and the voices it has are almost unintelligible, especially
the English one.  I'm not sure how much one can do yet with Open Source.

Nick