and how do you
perceive me as asking half a dozen questions? Perhaps maybe from now on I
should ask none since I ask too much? Hmm?
Chris.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Blouch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by
theblind" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 11:03 AM
Subject: Re: Really stupid question, but...
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.
