[GTALUG] Seeking help with a unique Linux project?

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Fri Dec 11 12:58:19 UTC 2015


On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 10:35:54PM -0500, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> I appreciate the welcome.  Oddly enough the one question I can think of
> first is if  drivers for hardware tend to remain even as the hardware ages?
> Again for a few reasons, I would prefer to use Debian squeeze.  Yes it is a
> couple of generations back, but I am told that more current editions have an
> accessibility issue, the use of speech from the  <spelling>
> Kernel.
> Granted as expressed, I do not want to use the speech itself from the
> machine, but use my own speech sources available to me as I ssh telnet.
> Still if I ever want to change this, I should be able to do as much.  My
> sound card goal while of professional quality does go back a bit.  Will I
> still find that Debian squeeze supports this card?

Yes linux very rarely removes drivers for old hardware.  It only happens
if they are broken and no one is willing to spend the time to fix them.
So tape drives connected to the floppy controller went away for example
because they didn't work with SMP machines, and were a terrible hack in
the first place, and pretty much no one still has one in use.

My Gravis Ultrasound sound card I bought in the early 90s still has
drivers in the current kernel.

Now Debian squeeze is not something I would recommend, since it is long
past due (in fact wheezy that replaced squeeze is about to be unsupported
too since it was replaced almost a year ago by jessie).

I would actually be surprised if Debian had issues with speech devices,
since that seems to be one of the things they work hard to keep working,
but since I don't have any such hardware and have never used any,
I wouldn't know for sure.  If there are issues, I am sure they would
like to hear about it so it can be fixed.

-- 
Len Sorensen


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