[Sderby] Skipper

[Mr Alan Carter]

> Anyone had a go at installing Skipper yet? Which version of SuSE does 
it
> install best on?

The current doco follows an exact install on SuSE 8.0. Anyone with any 
kind of UNIX experience should have no problem building and installing 
on any Linux or even FreeBSD though.

What's important is getting the packages it requires loaded. These are:


bison : for building the slighly hacked ctwm
flex : for parsing the onscreen menu config
fltk : the graphics toolkit for the onscreen menus
fltk-devel : as above
mesa-devel : required by fltk-devel
xdevel : as above

The exact packages for X and Mesa will vary according to the distrib.

The "Installing Festival" page gives detailed instructions for 
downloading and building the Festival voice synth from Edinburgh 
University (it good fun and I heartily recommend playing with it), and 
the "Installing Skipper" page gives detailed instructions for adjusting 
the /etc/XF86Config and /etc/inittab files. 

There's a simple skipper/install shell script that installs all the 
executables, which you can look at to see what it does. These files 
should be standard across all distribs.

Then you just run the skipuser script to set up each user's .profile 
and .xinitrc files - look in it if you're running a different distrib.

Because the X server has to read from /dev/skipper instead of /dev/ps2 
or (whatever) and XF86Config is a global resource, each user of the 
system has to run a minimal version of the input processing layer. That'
s what skipuser does. So if you've got a nice profile of your own, look 
in skipuser and do something equivalent by hand!

I've got Skipper 1.5.1 ready to upload to the website, which is a 
little more friendly if you want to play with the graphical input 
processing while using the onscreen menus. I'll see if I can connect my 
Linux box to the phone (depending on nephews) and upload tommorrow.

Any problems, drop me a line.

Thanks for the interest!

Alan

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