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Thanks for the anecdote. The sad part is that web applications CAN be as usable as terminals to the blind if the CGI returns text and only text. Talk to your manager and/or vendor - maybe you can beta-test an ADA compliant version with the vendors co-operation. Explain your position to them, your dilemma, and offer as a chance for the vendor to add a new feature to their application that may lead to more sales. Many workplaces have disabled employees. If their sales rep can say to prospect "Yes, it features a text-only mode and a screen-reader that enables vision-impaired employees to use the system" that can help close the deal.

The younger readers here may smirk, but that's because you have no idea. In corporate america, you work side by side with people who are too young (and too poor) to retire but too old to read anything smaller than an 18 point font. They just can't read it anymore, even with glasses. It's a real test of your patience when you're young, fast, and hyped up on caffiene and trying to help someone in their 60s use the system, and you realize... the reason their jobs/entries don't go through or error out is because their putting typos and spaces in their entries and they simply _cannot_ see the typo, even after you point them out. Seconds tick by as they stare... and say "Where? An extra space?"

See:
http://leb.net/blinux/blynx/

Maybe the one technology from Star Trek we should research are conversational computers, like Zen on Blake 7.

And honestly, anyone who isn't using Lynx can see the images just fine. I fail to see how using images suddenly breaks a website.

What web browser is better than Lynx, w3m, or Links for people who are blind or hard of sight, such as people who use GNU/Blinux?

Position is that I fail to see a significant moral difference between crashing a plane of passengers and handing out sanctions that only serve to starve the poor, young, old, and sick except that one takes a few thousand lives and the other may be counted in the millions.

Perhaps instead of focusing on the belief that "they are evil, plain and simple and must be extinguished" and forming our (very expensive) policies around this extremely simplistic view we should be asking ourselves "why do so many people want us dead so badly?". This is not to suggest that the blame lies on the victims of terrorism, but perhaps a change in our destructive, aggressive, and state sanctioned terrorism of 3rd world nations might wittle down the shear numbers of people who view us as evil.

For example, infant mortality has increased six-fold since 1990 in Iraq and 32% of children under 5 are malnourished. facts & myths (with citations). Impacts on Iraq population since 1990 have been devastating.

There's no doubt Saddam was a classic "mad dictator", but only in his wildest dreams could he have effected the level of destruction seen over the past 17 years. Further, despite our beliefs that Iraq was a backwards nation full of dolts the population used be quite educated by global standards with literacy rates reaching the upper 80 percent. A good portion of the pop is quite aware of the US's (Rumsfield and the first Bush administration's) contribution to Saddams domination by supplying the tools needed to carry out his attacks against certain sections of the population and Iran.

I am not defending the actions of terrorists in any way, but we're making it pretty damned easy for various groups to attract new recruits.

Unix Evolution Diagrams

Unix History

Development Tree of Unix Networking code

Unix timeline

Another timeline

There is BLinux.

I'm a visualy disabled OSS developer and linux consultant for hire. If your looking for information, its always best to check the lists around the tools we use, like tuxtalk, emacspeak, or blinux.

http://leb.net/blinux/
http://leb.net/blinux/blinux-develop.html
http://leb.net/blinux/list-archive/blinux-announce /all/msg00106.html

The main problem many of us have is the cost for the special hardware voice synth stuff. If you really want to make your stuff easier to use, work on software support and improve/create kernel leval /dev/speech output. The entire operating system should support this, but nobody is interested except the people who need it.

I'm a visualy disabled OSS developer and linux consultant for hire. If your looking for information, its always best to check the lists around the tools we use, like tuxtalk, emacspeak, or blinux.

http://leb.net/blinux/
http://leb.net/blinux/blinux-develop.html
http://leb.net/blinux/list-archive/blinux-announce /all/msg00106.html

The main problem many of us have is the cost for the special hardware voice synth stuff. If you really want to make your stuff easier to use, work on software support and improve/create kernel leval /dev/speech output. The entire operating system should support this, but nobody is interested except the people who need it.

I think this is a perfectly valid use for DRM.

Ask yourself this question: Who is the most important target audience for audio books? Hint: Who can't read paper books? Who in the 21st century could finally have unlimited access to the entire human knowledge but thanks to moronic ideas like this they don't?

It allows libraries to offer digital content, without screwing over the copyright holder.

Yeah, let's screw over blind people! Great idea.

It's unfortunate that a Microsoft DRM is being used (as I assume it can only be played on Microsoft systems)

But of course! Who needs BLINUX users, right? They can shell out ten grands to make Microsoft Windows accessible after all.

but it's most likely the easiest and most well known DRM to the people that put the DRM on the content (and the library staff can most likely offer trouble-shooting help with it as a result).

Good luck with that.

For the people with hearing problems, I think a well designed GUI is the key. We take 70% of our input visually, so it should be easier to overcome the dificulties of a hearing impaired user than those of a user with vision problems.

For those with vision problems, I've found quite a few links on software that will definitely help out. I'd suggest going with Linux because you can write your own stuff or customize something that's already written much easier.
BLINUX
General
ORALUX
ZipSpeak

As far as making an OS from scratch for people with different needs, here's what I'd do: I'd make native support for ASP.net applications. The user would only get HTML output from any program they use, but with different interaction capabilities than the traditional web. HTML is already very sensitive to the needs of the visually and hearing impaired users, therefore, you'd be leveraging technology that already exists.

Some Links:
Linux Accessibility HOWTO
The Blind Linux Project with mailing list
brltty for your braille input needs
Or, get an all in one distro

Some Links:
Linux Accessibility HOWTO
The Blind Linux Project with mailing list
brltty for your braille input needs
Or, get an all in one distro

blinux.

I doubt it, but it would help projects like BLINUX. :)

BLinux

Blind + Linux = BLINUX
"The purpose of BLINUX project is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system for the user who is blind"

It also turns out that the Command Line Interface is better for blind users than a GUI:

Unfortunately, almost all modern applications present information in a two-dimensional format, and most employ graphical icons that have no meaning for the blind. Since it is impractical to rewrite all these applications, the blind community has been forced to perform a rather awkward retrofit, using various adapters. We should recognize that this is not the ideal solution. Pasting a screen reader on top of Netscape makes it accessible, but the result is hardly efficient. Over the past decade a small minority of blind users have discovered Linux, a free, text-based operating system for the home computer. Linux applications rarely employ graphics, and most of them are already linear, just like the mode (speech or braille) that is our Karma. All other things being equal, Linux is the best operating system for a blind user.

Interesting to say the least...and Open Source makes it possible for (non profit) institutions closely acquainted with working with disabled people to adapt the software as necessary.....rather than relying on the perception and motivations of a (profit minded) corporation(s).

Those of us who must rely on speech recognition software to use our computers not only have no choice but commercial software, we are also relegated to Windows or, with arguably rather less function and accuracy, Mac. There is one open source project of which I'm aware, CMU Sphinx, but its progress is slow and it is not usable as a complete, continuous-speech, large vocabulary speech recognition solution. NaturallySpeaking for Windows is an excellent product and allows those of us with disabilities who cannot use keyboards to do what you see here and many of us who have paid for the software over the years don't begrudge supporting the company but, given its product is not available for any platform but Windows I think this is an excellent opportunity for OSS.

There are others who feel the same. In fact, for a time, IBM had a version of its speech recognition engine available for Linux users but it has since abandoned the project. So, OSS would seem to be the way to go, perhaps building on the very promising CMU Sphinx.

Emacspeak is a speech interface that allows blind and visually impaired users to interact independently and efficiently with the computer. Available free of cost on the Internet, Emacspeak has dramatically changed how the author and hundreds of blind and visually impaired users around the world interact with the personal computer and the Internet.

In my humble opinion Emacspeak is the most advanced voice enabled user interface currently available. If I wouldn't have seen a trained Emacspeak user reading his email faster that I ever could I never would have believed it. Did you ever see a person which is blind playing Tetris amazingly fast? It sounds incredible. Emacspeak makes it possible.

I won't tell you that you don't need some training until you are at home with Emacspeak. But if you are willing to invest some efforst, chances are good that you will be able to handle your computer faster than many sighted users.

When reading, writing, designing, or programming, the totally blind individual is inevitably restricted to a one dimensional world, be it speech or braille. This linear stream may take the form of a single-line display on a braille output device, or the words spoken by a speech synthesizer. There are brief moments when the blind user can enjoy the benefits of a 2-dimensional presentation. If he has a braille printer he might print out a chart or spread sheet and explore it with both hands. Indeed, when I studied mathematics at U.C. Berkeley I often had to write the equation, or set of related equations down in braille, and review it as a whole, before I understood it. However, one rarely has the time to construct such a two-dimensional tactile representation, similar to the screen or the printed page. As a general rule we must admit that the blind user is stuck in one dimension.

Unfortunately, almost all modern applications present information in a two-dimensional format, and most employ graphical icons that have no meaning for the blind. Since it is impractical to rewrite all these applications, the blind community has been forced to perform a rather awkward retrofit, using various adapters. We should recognize that this is not the ideal solution. Pasting a screen reader on top of Netscape makes it accessible, but the result is hardly efficient.

Over the past decade a small minority of blind users have discovered Linux, a free, text-based operating system for the home computer. Linux applications rarely employ graphics, and most of them are already linear, just like the mode (speech or braille) that is our Karma. All other things being equal, Linux is the best operating system for a blind user.

Of course things aren't always equal. If your job requires the use of a proprietary order entry system that only runs on Windows, then you'll be using Windows, with an adapter that tries to make the application somewhat accessible. But this scenario is actually quite rare. An employer may insist on a Microsoft Word document, but that doesn't force you to use Windows. You can write html code on Linux and mail it to your boss, who can then import it into Word. Conversely, your co-workers can easily export their Word documents into html for your benefit. There are very few reasons why you must use Windows. Let's assume you are considering Linux, where the applications are less graphical. That's a fair assumption, since you're already visiting this web site.

If you watch a sighted Linux user for an hour, you will notice that he spends most of his time in screen applications. He doesn't need the labyrinth of "helpful" menus and drop down boxes that Windows is famous for, and he has no patience for the "are you sure you want to do that" and "click ok if you really want to quit" dialog boxes, and he

The history of Dragon Naturally Speaking and ViaVoice is pretty interesting. Dragon Naturally Speaking was started by a company called Dragon, several years ago. Originally, they marketed a program called Dragon Dictate, which was designed for command and control, more so than for document dictation. They stumbled on a new technology using phonemes, and were able to create Naturally Speaking, which, like the name, allows someone to speak at normal conversational speeds and the software will still recognize it (Dragon Dictate pretty much made you speak like William Shatner on a bad day).

Fast forward a little...Naturally Speaking got sold to a company called Scansoft when Dragon went under (I forget why). Scansoft, within the last year bought ViaVoice from IBM, which had dropped sales and further development of their Linux version of the software, which is now nowhere to be found.

Ultimately, Scansoft pretty much controls the market in terms of Voice Dictation.

However, there are some interesting things still going on. For instance, Intel has been working on the Audio/Visual Speech Control/Recognition engine, which is part of Intel's OpenCV (face recognition stuff).

Ultimately, try out this link. There's quite a bit of information there.

Try minivMac, a Mac emulator. This emulates the Mac plus, and runs old Mac OSs (Systems 1 through 7) and software on new Macs (and PCs). Other sites like this have the necessary ROMs and OS images, or you can make these on her old Mac.

and the monitor and graphics are a bit wonky

You can get a Mac-VGA converter for less than $10 and use any PC monitor.

And yet, here you are complaining on Slashdot and trying to convince *other* people to donate to the EFF instead of doing so yourself.

Please excuse my "complaining on Slashdot," but I find having freedom extremely important. I do really hope I am not alone in that belief.

TCPA mandates that the system be user-disableable. It's part of the spec. TCPA will *never* refuse to load Linux, though it will *always* refuse to load as a trusted OS (since the kernel isn't signed...

Of course. TCPA will *never* refuse to obey our commands, should we choose to become second class citizens having absolutely no access to mainstream media whatsoever. One only has to wonder if that is a bad thing indeed...

But jokes aside. Do you think University which publishes online papers as Windows Word today is not going to use "Trusted" Word tomorrow? Do you think a bank which has IE-only website will change its mind when there's finally a way to make sure people indeed connect only with "Trusted" IE?

What about government websites? Are they going to allow "untrusted hacker software" to connect to their servers? Don't even let me start about Internet voting... The list goes on.

Let me guess what OS are you using right now... Oh, right, I thought so. So you're lucky. But are you going to give a Blinux using person few thousands dollars for software she will need soon? I hope so.

though I believe there is a project to get a TCPA-enabled copy of Linux).

Right! Are you really so naive to believe we'll be able to run our own kernals as part of our "trusted" OSen? Please...

Case in point... the U.N. food-for-oil program in Iraq. Saddam kept almost all of it for his government and military, all the while telling the Iraqi people that they had no food because we were stopping the flow of food. Not true... he was keeping it for himself.

Funny, it wasn't just Saddam who was saying this. So was Kofi Annan. So was Dennis Halliday, former head of the UN Humanitarian Mission in Iraq. Halliday resigned in protest, and went on to call the sanctions genocidal. So was Halliday's sucessor, Hans von Sponeck, who also resigned in protest.

There have been some allegations that Saddam got kickbacks from contractors through the Oil-for-Food program, but everything I've read suggests that OfF worked pretty much as well as it could given its limitations. If you have a link to some credible evidence which suggests otherwise, I'd be interested in reading it.

Shortsighted

One of the reasons DRM is so insane is because it is incredibly short sighted. I have records that are over 50 years old. I can play those records on virtually any turntable out there. Imagine if those records had been made with some sort of primitive DRM that required them to be played on a specific machine or required a call into a company to input a code before they would play. The truth is that most of those record companies don't even exist today. A huge cultural legacy would be lost.

The truth is obsolescence is already built in. Formats change computer file systems change, OSes change, our standards of quality change. My bet is that 50 years from now it will be just as rare to find someone playing mp3 files as it is tto find people playing old records now. You will have find a machine to read a certain kind of hard disk, find a way to read a particular file system, and then to interpret the format. Making those formats closed is virtually insuring the digital death of the music (or the video or whatever data they happen to contain).

I already see this problem with old software and data. I have a ton of programs from the apple ][ days. With some doing I can get that data off the old 5 1/2 inch disks and into an emulator under OS X. Most programs work and I can see the data (mainly high school book reports in appleworks), but it's a lot of effort. Luckily I was pretty good about keeping serial numbers around, but the programs that inevitably fail are the ones with anti-copy copy protection. Even back then the odd sector layout would cause problems on certain disk drives. Now the programs are essentially dead. With enough work I could probably revive them, but who has the time? We see the same problem now with certain cds with bad data written in on purpose to foil copying, but also foil playing on certain systems (actually in this case maybe it is a good thing to prevent Celine Dion from propagating her evil).

I have the same problem with my old Mac data circa 1984/85 even without copy protection. I have data in formats of programs that simply don't exist anymore (does anyone remember Fullwrite...so far ahead of it's time, but doomed by MS Word). My only hope for reading this data is finding an old machine or waiting until someone builds a good 68000 emulator (vmac has a ways to go)

Doing this to music (on purpose no less) is particularly insidious because music is one of the things that should live on as a cultural legacy. When I buy a CD I want it to last and I want to be able to play it whether I am here in LA or in a Kashgari taxi. I doubt that 2053 my grandkids will enjoy my Nada Surf mp3s the way I enjoy my grandfather's Vera Lynn and Tex Williams records, but I would like them to have the chance at listening to them in the first place.

I myself was thinking of using Debian, but I never heard of Festival... I'll definately look it up though.

Festival is a speech synthesis system. Under Debian, just type "apt-get install festival festival-doc" (and festival-dev if you want to use it in your own programs). It has a nice built-in Scheme-based command interpreter.

I think Debian is a great choice for vision impaired users. Take a look at the Debian Accessibility Project and Accessibility HOWTO. There are even speakup enabled boot floppies for Woody (Debian 3.0, the current stable version).

Also, take a look at BrlSpeak, a Braille and Speech Mini-Distribution of GNU/Linux. It is based on Debian, developed by Osvaldo La Rosa, visually impaired Debian user. Let me quote the website:

Objective:
BrlSpeak is here to make life easier for blind people who wish to install a GNU/Linux distribution on their computer WITHOUT ANY assistance from a sighted person. The objective is to create and develop a blindfriendly GNU/Linux distribution enabling a blind user:
a) To preconfigure the braille driver config file before running GNU/Linux
b) To compile the braille driver without having to see (or to hear)
c) To have the braille display immediately operational when booting GNU/Linux for the first time

BrlSpeak can be installed on a FAT partition. There's a 36MB .zip file or CD ISO9660 image for download.

There's also Free(b)deb, a Free(b)soft's specialized linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. From the website:

The goal of the Free(b)deb project is to provide a specialized distribution of complete Debian GNU/Linux operating system including specialized software, which enables blind and visually impaired users to work with computer.

However I'm not sure how to install it and where to download it from.

(I don't talk about Blinux, as it has already been mentioned in the story.)

Good luck.

CLI is obviously easier to scrape well.
The Blinux Project(not a distro.)
A SuSE Linux article on Blinux(Writen by a blind SuSE Developer)

Take a look at Blinux, it's a Linux distribution especially targetted at the blind.

Access Mozilla should be a good starting point...even better is that ViaVoice is free for the disabled...

Blind Linux is also a good start...

As a side note, if these students are not disabled, then it might be better to use a browser to teach them to read rather than have it read for them...

There are certainly times when one would want a non-CLI interface even if one were blind - for example, when using programs that are not (and should not) be for the console, such as word processors.

You mean the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processors? (I hope it's not some stupid joke.) "The best output a blind person using WYSIWYG software can hope for is getting no output at all" as the anonymous geek quoted on BLinux FAQ has said. There are typesetting (or "word processing") tools working perfectly well in any text editor you have. I personally use Donald Knuth's TeX and Leslie Lamport's LaTeX extention because they are more powerful than any WYSIWYG tool I've ever used (including TeXmacs), while also giving me much better looking results. They're not only more powerful for people with good sight like myself, they can also be used from any text editor a blind person can use, like the Emacspeak for example. That's if a blind person ever needs such a tool, like for writing a book or printed article. Because using word processors for communication (like most of people use Microsoft Word these days) instead of plain text email is stupid at least.

Blind + Linux = BLINUX
"The purpose of BLINUX project is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system for the user who is blind"

After searching Google for blind linux, I found BLINUX as the first result, I'm surprised no one has suggested it yet. There's probably everything one should know trying to set up a Linux box for blind users.

As for the text mode vs. GUI, let me quote BLINUX FAQ, emphasis is mine:

5.4 X Window Support

5.4.1 Q: Is anyone working on X-Windows screen reading capability?

A: Yes. Don't hold your breath, though. Much of the X stuff will never work well this way. There has been some discussion here of the superior possibilities for the new Gnome desktop (see the archives for details). The really important thing to understand, is that you have very little reason to be concerned about the GUI stuff, because of the rich functionality available in text mode. Also, Brian Selden is working on porting Ultrasonix to Linux. Ultrasonix is a screen access package for X that was originally developed for Sun SPARCstations running Solaris; see http://www.henge.com/~brian/ultralin.html for info.

This is basically what I thought, but I searched the FAQ to make sure how the most interested people feel about it.

Blind + Linux = BLINUX
"The purpose of BLINUX project is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system for the user who is blind"

After searching Google for blind linux, I found BLINUX as the first result, I'm surprised no one has suggested it yet. There's probably everything one should know trying to set up a Linux box for blind users.

As for the text mode vs. GUI, let me quote BLINUX FAQ, emphasis is mine:

5.4 X Window Support

5.4.1 Q: Is anyone working on X-Windows screen reading capability?

A: Yes. Don't hold your breath, though. Much of the X stuff will never work well this way. There has been some discussion here of the superior possibilities for the new Gnome desktop (see the archives for details). The really important thing to understand, is that you have very little reason to be concerned about the GUI stuff, because of the rich functionality available in text mode. Also, Brian Selden is working on porting Ultrasonix to Linux. Ultrasonix is a screen access package for X that was originally developed for Sun SPARCstations running Solaris; see http://www.henge.com/~brian/ultralin.html for info.

This is basically what I thought, but I searched the FAQ to make sure how the most interested people feel about it.

This paper analyzes the amount of source code in GNU/Linux, using Red Hat Linux 7.1 as a representative GNU/Linux distribution, and presents what I believe are interesting results.

In particular, it would cost over $1 billion ($1,000 million - a Gigabuck) to develop this GNU/Linux distribution by conventional proprietary means in the U.S. (in year 2000 U.S. dollars). Compare this to the $600 million estimate for Red Hat Linux version 6.2 (which had been released about one year earlier). Also, Red Hat Linux 7.1 includes over 30 million physical source lines of code (SLOC), compared to well over 17 million SLOC in version 6.2. Using the COCOMO cost model, this system is estimated to have required about 8,000 person-years of development time (as compared to 4,500 person-years to develop version 6.2). Thus, Red Hat Linux 7.1 represents over a 60% increase in size, effort, and traditional development costs over Red Hat Linux 6.2. This is due to an increased number of mature and maturing open source / free software programs available worldwide.

Many other interesting statistics emerge. The largest components (in order) were the Linux kernel (including device drivers), Mozilla (Netscape's open source web system including a web browser, email client, and HTML editor), the X Window system (the infrastructure for the graphical user interface), gcc (a compilation system), gdb (for debugging), basic binary tools, emacs (a text editor and far more), LAPACK (a large Fortran library for numerical linear algebra), the Gimp (a bitmapped graphics editor), and MySQL (a relational database system). The languages used, sorted by the most lines of code, were C (71% - was 81%), C++ (15% - was 8%), shell (including ksh), Lisp, assembly, Perl, Fortran, Python, tcl, Java, yacc/bison, expect, lex/flex, awk, Objective-C, Ada, C shell, Pascal, and sed.

The predominant software license is the GNU GPL. Slightly over half of the software is simply licensed using the GPL, and the software packages using the copylefting licenses (the GPL and LGPL), at least in part or as an alternative, accounted for 63% of the code. In all ways, the copylefting licenses (GPL and LGPL) are the dominant licenses in this GNU/Linux distribution. In contrast, only 0.2% of the software is public domain.

This paper is an update of my previous paper on estimating GNU/Linux's size, which measured Red Hat Linux 6.2 [Wheeler 2001]. Since Red Hat Linux 6.2 was released in March 2000, and Red Hat Linux 7.1 was released in April 2001, this paper shows what's changed over approximately one year. More information is available at http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc. 1. Introduction The GNU/Linux operating system has gone from an unknown to a powerful market force. Netcraft found that, of the systems running web servers on June 2001, GNU/Linux was now the second most popular operating system (with 29.6%, versus Windows' 49.6%) [Netcraft 2001]. Another survey, of primarily European and educational sites, found that GNU/Linux was used more than any other operating system (of the sites it surveyed) [Zoebelein 1999]. IDC found that 25% of all server operating systems purchased in 1999 were GNU/Linux, making it second only to Windows NT's 38% [Shankland 2000a].

There appear to be many reasons for this, and not simply because GNU/Linux can be obtained at no or low cost. For example, experiments suggest that GNU/Linux is highly reliable. A 1995 study of a set of individual components found that the GNU and GNU/Linux components had a significantly higher reliability than their proprietary Unix competitors (6% to 9% failure rate with GNU and Linux, versus an average 23% failure rate with the proprietary software using their measurement technique) [Miller 1995]. A ten-month experiment in 1999 by ZDnet found that, while Microsoft's Windows NT crashed every six weeks under a ``typical'' intranet load, using the same load and request set the GNU/Linux systems (from two different distributors) never crashed [Vaughan-Nichols 1999].

However, possibly the most important reason for GNU/Linux's popularity among many developers and users is that its source code is generally ``open source software'' and/or ``free software''. A program that is ``open source software'' or ``free software'' is essentially a program whose source code can be obtained, viewed, changed, and redistributed without royalties or other limitations of these actions. A more formal definition of ``open source software'' is available from the Open Source Initiative [OSI 1999], a more formal definition of ``free software'' (as the term is used in this paper) is available from the Free Software Foundation [FSF 2000], and other general information about these topics is available at Wheeler [2000a]. Quantitative rationales for using open source / free software is given in Wheeler [2000b]. The GNU/Linux operating system is actually a suite of components, including the Linux kernel on which it is based, and it is packaged, sold, and supported by a variety of distributors. The Linux kernel is ``open source software''/``free software'', and this is also true for all (or nearly all) other components of a typical GNU/Linux distribution. Open source software/free software frees users from being captives of a particular vendor, since it permits users to fix any problems immediately, tailor their system, and analyze their software in arbitrary ways.

Surprisingly, although anyone can analyze GNU/Linux for arbitrary properties, I have found little published analysis of the amount of source lines of code (SLOC) contained in a GNU/Linux distribution. Microsoft unintentionally published some analysis data in the documents usually called ``Halloween I'' and ``Halloween II'' [Halloween I] [Halloween II]. Another study focused on the Linux kernel and its growth over time is by Godfrey [2000]; this is an interesting study but it focuses solely on the Linux kernel (not the entire operating system). Paul G. Allen posted some results from running Scientific Toolworks, Inc.'s tools on the Linux kernel, but this analysis only considered C code (including headers) - ignoring the many other languages used in constructing the Linux kernel (e.g., assembly language), and only concentrating on the kernel. The Free Code Graphing Project at http://fcgp.sourceforge.net generates a graphical representation of a program (currently, the Linux kernel), but only of the C code. In a previous paper, I examined Red Hat Linux 6.2 and the numbers from the Halloween papers [Wheeler 2001].

This paper updates my previous paper, showing estimates of the size of one of today's GNU/Linux distributions, and it estimates how much it would cost to rebuild this typical GNU/Linux distribution using traditional software development techniques. Various definitions and assumptions are included, so that others can understand exactly what these numbers mean. I have intentionally written this paper so that you do not need to read the previous version of this paper first.

For my purposes, I have selected as my ``representative'' GNU/Linux distribution Red Hat Linux version 7.1. I believe this distribution is reasonably representative for several reasons:

1. Red Hat Linux is the most popular Linux distribution sold in 1999 according to IDC [Shankland 2000b]. Red Hat sold 48% of all copies in 1999; the next largest distribution in market share sales was SuSE (a German distributor) at 15%. Not all GNU/Linux copies are ``sold'' in a way that this study would count, but the study at least shows that Red Hat's distribution is a popular one.
2. Many distributions (such as Mandrake) are based on, or were originally developed from, a version of Red Hat Linux. This doesn't mean the other distributions are less capable, but it suggests that these other distributions are likely to have a similar set of components.
3. All major general-purpose distributions support (at least) the kind of functionality supported by Red Hat Linux, if for no other reason than to compete with Red Hat.
4. All distributors start with the same set of open source software projects from which to choose components to integrate. Therefore, other distributions are likely to choose the same components or similar kinds of components with often similar size for the same kind of functionality.

Different distributions and versions would produce different size figures, but I hope that this paper will be enlightening even though it doesn't try to evaluate ``all'' distributions. Note that some distributions (such as SuSE) may decide to add many more applications, but also note this would only create larger (not smaller) sizes and estimated levels of effort. At the time that I began this project, version 7.1 was the latest version of Red Hat Linux available, so I selected that version for analysis.

Note that Red Hat Linux 6.2 was released on March 2000, Red Hat Linux 7 was released on September 2000 (I have not counted its code), and Red Hat Linux 7.1 was released on April 2001. Thus, the differences between Red Hat Linux 7.1 and 6.2 show differences accrued over 13 months (approximately one year).

Clearly there is far more open source / free software available worldwide than is counted in this paper. However, the job of a distributor is to examine these various options and select software that they believe is both sufficiently mature and useful to their target market. Thus, examining a particular distribution results in a selective analysis of such software.

Section 2 briefly describes the approach used to estimate the ``size'' of this distribution (more details are in Appendix A). Section 3 discusses some of the results. Section 4 presents conclusions, followed by an appendix. GNU/Linux is often called simply ``Linux'', but technically Linux is only the name of the operating system kernel; to eliminate ambiguity this paper uses the term ``GNU/Linux'' as the general name for the whole system and ``Linux kernel'' for just this inner kernel. 2. Approach My basic approach was to:

1. install the source code files in uncompressed format; this requires carefully selecting the source code to be analyzed.
2. count the number of source lines of code (SLOC); this requires a careful definition of SLOC.
3. use an estimation model to estimate the effort and cost of developing the same system in a proprietary manner; this requires an estimation model.
4. determine the software licenses of each component and develop statistics based on these categories.

More detail on this approach is described in Appendix A. A few summary points are worth mentioning here, however. 2.1 Selecting Source Code

I included all software provided in the Red Hat distribution, but note that Red Hat no longer includes software packages that only apply to other CPU architectures (and thus packages not applying to the x86 family were excluded). I did not include ``old'' versions of software, or ``beta'' software where non-beta was available. I did include ``beta'' software where there was no alternative, because some developers don't remove the ``beta'' label even when it's widely used and perceived to be reliable.

I used md5 checksums to identify and ignore duplicate files, so if the same file contents appeared in more than one file, it was only counted once (as a tie-breaker, such files are assigned to the first build package it applies to in alphabetic order).

The code in makefiles and Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) specifications was not included. Various heuristics were used to detect automatically generated code, and any such code was also excluded from the count. A number of other heuristics were used to determine if a language was a source program file, and if so, what its language was.

Since different languages have different syntaxes, I could only measure the SLOC for the languages that my tool (sloccount) could detect and handle. The languages sloccount could detect and handle are Ada, Assembly, awk, Bourne shell and variants, C, C++, C shell, Expect, Fortran, Java, lex/flex, LISP/Scheme, Makefile, Objective-C, Pascal, Perl, Python, sed, SQL, TCL, and Yacc/bison. Other languages are not counted; these include XUL (used in Mozilla), Javascript (also in Mozilla), PHP, and Objective Caml (an OO dialect of ML). Also code embedded in data is not counted (e.g., code embedded in HTML files). Some systems use their own built-in languages; in general code in these languages is not counted.

http://leb.net/blinux/

Complete with FAQ, docs and mailing lists.

Well, there is a few speech synthesis programs that are quite nice, festival (good) or IBM:s ViaVoice (excellent) for example.

However, only a few application supports speech-devices. But since its possible to use many application in plain textmode from a VT102-terminal (pine for e-mail, editors, links for surfing etc) wouldnt it be great if somone developed a braille display that you hook on to a serialport and replaces the screen.

(Textmode rules! I do 70% of my computing on the VT102 terminal in my livingroom).

I believe that there are some support for speech devices in the kernel aswell, unless im wrong.

Furthermore i'd like to direct you to BLINUX

(I use viavoice to read me a bedtime story every now and then, but found out that a Mommy is better at that - afaik she never kept on reading after i fell asleep)

If you do this by using a utility like utility like The Proxomiton, IE displays the same error message! See here for an example of this.

Furthermore, if you use the same utility on Opera 5 to alter the UA from 'Opera' to 'OpXra' MSN will actually display pretty much as expected. Admitadley, it doesn't display exactly the same as IE normally displays but it is very similar and completely usable.

Microsoft are clearly targetting specific browsers which I think is very wrong! What about people who can't use IE because of having old hardware (and hence use a less resource intensive browser), the 'wrong' OS or disabled users who rely on browsers like BLynx???

Surely these users should be allowed to eXPerience the 'joys' of MSN. If Microsoft truely believe that you can only really appreciate how good MSN is with IE, then have a disclaimer appear at the top of the page when a so called 'non-complient' browser accesses your website but don't stop people accessing altogether!!!

Here are some more stats, although two years old now, Linux was at 31.3% and had the highest growth rate of all systems on that survey.

Looking over the "paper" I noted some interesting things on just a quick viewing: 1)under "Performance Date" item 2 "GNU/Linux was the May 2001 performance leader in the TPC-H decision support (database) benchmark (``100Gb'' category)"
Um yes, they did, but they did it on a machine that costs $948966.00. System description It was one of the most expensive machines in the running. The number 2 machine is an Win2k / SQL Server 2000 machine for a third the price. The Top Ten price / performance list is dominated by Windows 2000 / SQL Server 2000. TPC.org
2)The count of web servers in operation is a bit misleading as the source of the information states that "...host addresses of the .edu domain were used..." and if you look at the report there are NO .com domains represented. Well, gee. I wonder why there are so many linux boxes in the report? Just pointing out that statistics represent those that present them.

Also check out BLINUX.

blindprogramming.com

Gnu's blind programmer

games written by a blind programmer for blind users

Hope this helps.

Maybe you are looking at a different market than the rest of us, but while I was unable to find any commercial statistics (I know they're out there), the Internet Operating System Counter seems to think differently...

-John

One of the Fundamental differences between all Unixes and every other OS ever invented is the use of memory to buffer the filesystem.

Actually, disk caching is NOT a unique idea at all.

Macs have supported a disk cache for performance since at least System 3.0, in 1986. You can see a history of the old Mac OS here. However, I'm not sure if this is a read cache only and what form of cache writing scheme it supports if any nowdays.

While I can't really say about the DOS-based Windows variants, the NT versions of the Win32 API has lots of support for asynchronous file I/O. By default, all normal disk writes are written to a disk cache which is lazily flushed. You can specify certain options when opening a file handle with Cre ateFile() to force it to write straight through to disk rather than lazily cache it. In fact NT gets its asynchronous packet-based I/O subsystem design from VMS. (The designers of the NT kernel were ex-VMS designers.)

Finally, while I can't speak about the Amiga, I can speak about MVS's descendant OS, OS/390, which can handle asynchronous file I/O. I can't find you a good link, but most of the references I could find on this talk about OS/390's UNIX services. Apparently around release 2 of OS/390, they began to comply to the XOpen definition of a UNIX, so I guess that doesn't help that much.

When the "Internet Operating System Counter" scan reached the .il (israel) domain it caused some concern! At least they did give a plausible explanation, publish their results, and stop querying areas where people complained (like all of .il!).

When people start measuring your neighbourhood in great detail, and refuse to explain just what it is for, I think you have a right to be suspicious and uncooperative. I hope those who have the right tools in place will just set themselves to ignore (i.e. fail to respond to) traffic from these people. If they get no answer to their pings, it will server them right for being so secretive.

And about your second paragraph:

1. Linux might just wind up feeding some of the world's hungry. I could see where extremely low-cost computing could certainly help Third-World countries. 100% of the web servers in .td, .ne, .lr., gq, .cf, and .dj run Linux (source: Internet Operating System Counter). Even superficially speaking, that has to create some jobs.

   You can't tell me that countries with lots of manpower and very little money wouldn't benefit from what amounts to essentially free computing power. If nothing else, Linux can help countries like Niger and Djibouti keep up in the technology game. You think they'd have that chance if they had to pay per seat to get Windows servers up? They'd have a much, much worse chance wihtout Linux around.

2. Linux is helping to sure disease. I happen to know for a fact that UCLA (among many other places) runs a rather large Linux cluster for doing things like chemical analysis for medical research. They do way more with Linux than they could ever do without Linux. Big hardware isn't cheap, and there's only so much grant money to go around -- a Linux RAIC-ish system stretches a budget to the point that the previously impossible becomes possible.

   Take a look at the Linux Medical Research HOWTO and then tell me Linux isn't helping cure disease. I'm sure that someone else here can give you first-hand experience on what Linux is doing in the medical community.

3. Linux isn't going to put a man on Mars?!? Now I know you're joking. Do you know how much Linux junk NASA runs? Hell, the driver for the NIC in every Linux box I have was written by a guy at NASA (it's the Tulip driver). And there's always Beowulf, but that probably won't do anything to help get a man on Mars.

I'm not saying Linux is a panacea, and anyone that does so is a certifiable moron who has no idea what (s)he's talking about (at least they'll be easy to identify and avoid). But to say that Linux isn't helping make some really wonderful things happen is extremely short-sighted. In fact, I'm still not convinced that you weren't joking. If I hadn't replied in this thread, I probably would have moderated it up as "funny".

-B

The last time the OS survey at this site was updated was a year ago. What gives? We need real statistics on operating systems in use on web servers. Netcraft shows us how many Appache servers are out there - nearly 60% of all web servers are running appache - and it really seems hard to believe that less than 1/2 of them are running Linux. Which would put Linux tied with Microsoft (all flavors).

Am I wrong about this? I think the number of Linux servers is being serverly underestimated.

it's hard to use this list to compare linux vs. NT, because lots of the bugs listed for the operating systems are in add-ons and third-party products.

the nearest statistical comparison of openrating-system-security is on attritions web-defacement-counter. in the overall OS-count from august 1999 to present Win-NT is leading clearly with 55%, followed by linux with 19% and solaris with 13%. source: http://www.attrition.org/mirror/att rition/os.html

these total number of defacements should also take into account, that there are more webservers running on linux than on NT, as can be seen here.

open source brings a security-problem which is not as big in closed source: it's far easier to write trojans. but this risk is small compared to backdoors intentionally implemented by clodes-source software manufactures. a good example is the international version of lotus notes where the NSA knows 24bit of the 64bit-key.

Oh, give me a break! Linux is not leading Windows 2000. Does linux have an MS Office 2000 clone? 100% word compatibility?

Yep.

No, then it's dead in the water for corporate adoption.

Linux owns a good sized chunk of the Web. I consider that "corporate adoption". Check out the April Operating Systems counter for numbers. Back in April, Linux was at 28% and all versions of Windows were at 24%. I suspect that it's larger for Linux now, especially having walked through some large co-location facilities and seen the racks of VA/Linux and Penguin Computing boxes.

controlling one market allows you to rapidly extend into other

Yep, and the server market will be Linux's springboard to the desktop.

the hardware drivers are not on par with their NT counterparts, nor is the support infrastructure there.

Corel recently annonced a major effort to bring hardware manufacturers on-board (it's why I bought their stock). The first results were turn-arounds on releasing driver source from Creative and some other video manufacturer. This will be the Linux story of 2000 -- driver support will start shipping with the hardware, and it will snow-ball until you start getting Linux drivers with your breakfast cereal!

On other news, the slow climb into the games market progresses. I was playing Myth II under Linux last night, and DAMN that Voodoo3 support is nice. The card cost me a lot, but it was well worth the price to see such flawless graphics and animation. Plus, I didn't have to take down my DNS server (primary for my domain), Web server or shut down any of my encrypted login sessions to other systems. It just performed perfectly. Of course I had to engage a whole 300MHz system to do it. What a shame it just runs a little too slow on a 166. ;-)

Since the vast majority of Linux servers ran Apache at the time you are talking something like 28% Apache + Linux. The majority of Netscape Servers were actually deployed on NT so NT + IIS probably amounted to 15%.

It's only not a lie if they count different kernel, Distribution and Apache versions separately. What about NT Service packs ?

They only count around 1/4 the net which would give them less than 1% margin of error.

You'll want to look at Blinux if you actually care about the state of voice-interfacing in linux.

This page, in particular, shows the various voice-recognition projects, so that you may research what can be done that way.

And, as a side-note, linux is infinitely more suited to voice if you know how to use the command line, because all you need is an engine that converts speech-to-text, not one that converts speech-to-text-to-equivalent-mouse-action.




--Parity

You'll want to look at Blinux if you actually care about the state of voice-interfacing in linux.

This page, in particular, shows the various voice-recognition projects, so that you may research what can be done that way.

And, as a side-note, linux is infinitely more suited to voice if you know how to use the command line, because all you need is an engine that converts speech-to-text, not one that converts speech-to-text-to-equivalent-mouse-action.




--Parity

Microsoft has invested heavily in developing accessible software .

There are some Linux projects, such as BLINUX and the command line interface is an advantage in this context.

However, Microsoft has been much more active in this field.

http://leb.net/blinux/index.html

"The purpose of BLINUX
is to improve usability of the LINUX operating system
for the user who is blind" -- from their homepage

They've been around for a while now, and they're definitely worth checking out if you're developing nearly any applications. This is perhaps the first time I've ever been happy to hear about a lawsuit. (did you hear that AOL lawyer backpedaling?)

But for.edu sites, Windows > Solaris + Linux. I think this is a Very Bad Thing that could Spell The End, because if kids are getting Windows exposure instead of Unix exposure in college, we could end up seeing a Grim version of what caused much of Unix's real-world popularity in the first place--people took what they used in college and started wanting to use it in the real world, too.