Chris Gilland wrote:
I know th answer to this already, most likely, but I can't resist asking.
Actually, I have two questions.
Firstly, Being that really in all truth, under the hood, the Mac OS is
in deed Unix, If I go to a terminal, how likely is it, I could install
the Debian package I bought of T T Synth, for Linux, register it,
then, use that with voice over. I know you need
libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 or someting to that effect, don't have the
library name up in front a me. It's basicly an older c++ library,
but, being that that synth was built around the Unix platform, etc. I
just wonder if it could in theory, be done.
That's really about half a dozen questions <smile>. Yes, OSX is unix
underneath but if you're familiar with unix then you also know that
there are many many flavors and software for one doesn't just run under
another. So you have the HPUX, Solaris, Liux, BSD and whatever flavors
of packages. Today most releases are for Linux but even then there are
dozens of variations of Linux which all do things a little different.
So, if you had the src files you could in theory compile and link it to
the appropriate libraries and it would run. The tricky bits would be
hooking it into the audio libraries since I'm assuming OSX's method for
doing this would be much different than any other unix. Unix
historically (other than maybe SGI Irix) hasn't been big into sound so I
guess each variant did its own thing, if they supported sound at all. A
step beyond is any APIs into AT such as screen readers. Windows, Mac and
Linux all have their own APIs for how apps communicate what's going on
to the assistive technology so any library for Linux would need modified
to use the Apple API and I suspect the models of how things should work
are going to be different.
The other thing I wonder is, if I wanted to play with an old copy a
out spoken, could I install it, and shut off voice over for a
temporary time, and see how it worked, or would I really need an older
Mac for that. No, I really don't wanna switch to outspoken, God no.
Im not that stupid, I'd just outta curiousity like to see it in
action. Even if there were an mp3 somewhere a wsomeone using it.
Since Outspoken was an OS9 app it depends a bit on what hardware you're
running. OSX on non-intel boxes had an OS9 emulator which will allow you
to run older stuff. It might just work but you might have to have an OS9
app running to wake up the emulator before Outspoken would work, and
Outspoken would only get its fingers into other OS9 apps.
CB
Chris.
