now, First, the comments. Unless you've been living under a rock, you
probably have heard of the Raspberry Pi.
 
Surfing around, I discovered the gizmo is going to be fairly accessible to a
blind person with an intermediate knowledge of Linux.
 
And for someone who doesn't, the Cisco Acadamey for the Visually impaired,
(cavi for short),  will offer a course in Linux administration with the
Raspberry pie, this summer, starting the first week of august. I took their
Linux admin course for Ubuntu last year, and though I was able to sleep
through the first four weeks of beginner stuff,  as soon as the course
picked up speed, I really had to work.
 
Cavi often doesn't document new courses well, but go to
 
http://www.cavitraining.com/
 
to find out what you can, and enroll if interested. If history is any guide,
they'll be charging around $150 for individuals who are not rehab clients. I
paid in 4 installments and they are very flexible about this.
 
Hams at least in my circle are super excited about the rPi, for short, as
its ability to control external devices is handled through a2D conversion on
the board, but ability to control the rPi itself is done through a serial
port, or USB. The model B priced at $35 also has ethernet whereas the model
A priced at $25 doesn't. For blind hams there is audio, both analog and
digital through HDMI, though speakup is reported to not be working well yet.
I'd probably adjust the configuration file on its SD card so I could
automatically connect via ssh. This is well-documented, and anyone with some
command line knowledge can easily fix the system to boot, so they can
connect remotely and never need a sightling for the entire process.  (That's
what I love best about Linux; you are limited by your skill and never lack
of sight!)
 
Read about the Pi here:
 
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
 
If this is all greek to you, worry not, as there's a brand-new way to get
your first Linux installed. Last year, I wrote up a cumbersome Eyes-free
guide for Cavi, using techniques we learned in class, so that outsiders
wouldn't need to pay for a class to get a system running. You can read that
here:
 
http://linuxwiki.cucat.org/index.php?n=Main.Eyes-FreeLinuxInstallationUnderW
indows
 
In my guide, I walk you through getting Linux installed under Windows
without requiring any Linux knowledge nor sighted help whatsoever.
 
But today, software speech is built in to the Debian wheezy install, and
actually works. I installed Debian yesterday on an old laptop, using only
software speech,and it worked great. (This is the stable distro, currently
software speech appears to be partly broken in the testing version.)
 
I installed the testing version as well on another PC using software speech
but it totally failed to talk on my laptop with its built-in Realtek audio
chip. So I'd suggest sticking with the stable version, which actually for
Debian is pretty new, as it was just released in May.
 
To install, you boot the CD, type the letter s when it stopps spinning,
press ENTER, and the entire installation talks. It helps to know a bit about
the screen reader Speakup, but I can help people who post to this list. You
can also surf around, though learning Linux can gobble up huge chunks of
free time, so be warned.
 
The big advantage of Linux for hams is that you can run it on those old
machines that limp along even under Windows 98. This means nobody in the
household cares if you take that old desktop with the busted monitor, or the
laptop that even Johnny finds too slow for doing his homework.
 
On my linux boxes I record television using PVR software called MythTV. I
also play and record internet radio, write little programs in Perl and
download podcasts, weather reports and ebooks. Many others use Linux as a
router, file server or mail server. 
 
Anyway, what does all this have to do with ham radio? There is a ton of ham
software for Linux, and here we get to my question. Though I've hacked
around in Linux for years, and been a ham for around  18 years, one thing
I've never done is combine the two. I'm looking for recommendations of
software that works in the Linux consile, especially rig control software. 
 
--Debee [KF6BKR]