Hi John, As for your first question allow me to build upon what I mentioned to you off list as this may clear up some questions you have about Linux installations. I'm not sure how much or familiar you are with the Linux package management system so I will explain it all in down to earth terms. Every Linux distribution uses what is known as a package manager to add and remove programs. Over the last 5 years or so most Linux operating systems have more or less settled on one of the major package managers (RPM and DPKG.) The Red Hat Package Manager, (RPM,) was developed by Red Hat and is widely used on most of the Linux operating systems out there. Red Hat, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora, Cent OS, etc all are examples of Linux distributions that use RPM for adding and removing software. One of the great advantages of RPM is that it is fully accessible from the command line, or from a terminal Window, and installing is as easy as doing rpm -i my-game-1.0.i386.rpm and letting it rip. Package managers like rpm also have a huge advantage over standard installations for the fact they are able to check for missing dependancies. For example, say you set your rpm build script to search for Java 1.5. If it scans the system, and finds Java 1.4.2 it will report an error to the end user and tell them to upgrade the Java 2 Runtime Environment before continuing with the installation. Some years ago Debian OS created it's own package manager, (DPKG,) and it also has wide spread use in the Linux comunity. Debian and Ubuntu are two distributions that are quite popular and use DPKG as it's installation and package manager. Like RPM DPKG can scan the system for missing or old dependancies and let the end user know the end product won't run without this or that being upgraded or installed. I can say from personal experience two distrubutions of linux have become quite popular amung blind Linux users. The first is a modified version of Fedora which is maintained by the Speakup group http://www.linux-speakup.org and is quite accessible from all accounts. Fedora uses RPM. The other Linux distribution that has a huge blind user base is Ubuntu Linux found at http://www.ubuntu.com and the Ubuntu team work hard to make it accessible to blind users. predictably it uses DPKG. However, Ubuntu offers a program called Alien which can convert RPM files to DPKG. Ubuntu recently made a deal with Del to ship Ubuntu Linux on some of Del's new notebooks and desktop PC's complete with the Orca screen reader and other accessibility software preinstalled. What this means is any blind user can now go out and order a Del Linux notebook or PC from the Del web site, and have it delivered with all relevant access software on the machine. This is likely going to result in more wide use of Linux by blind users, and it takes all the pain out of finding a compatible Linux computer,and getting accessibility installed and going on your own. I hope this information was useful.
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