Introducing Vinux
Yesterday evening I was down Bristol’s City Hall attending an event to launch Accessible Bristol (read my account of the event for Bristol Wireless).
While there I was talking to the City Council’s Stephen Hilton and happened to mention Vinux – Linux for the Visually Impaired – which Stephen had never heard of, despite being visually impaired himself.
Vinux is a remastered version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution optimised for visually impaired users. It provides a screen-reader, full-screen magnification and support for Braille displays out of the box! It can be run from a Live CD on an existing machine without making any changes to your hard drive. It can also be installed to a USB pen drive or to a hard drive; as a hard drive installation this can be done either alongside Windows (dual boot) or as a complete replacement for the Hell of Gates. 🙂
The system requirements for the main (as opposed to the command line interface) version of Linux are:
- 1 GHz x86 processor;
- 1 GB of system memory (RAM);
- 15 GB of hard-drive space (although this can be split onto 2 drives, a 5Gb / and a 10Gb /home partition fairly easily);
- Graphics card and monitor capable of 1024 X 768 resolution;
- Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB socket (or both);
- Internet access is helpful though not vital.
Vinux 3.2.1 is the current experimental release and disk images of various vintages can be downloaded from the Vinux project’s downloads page.