installing bsd with speech

[Eric Oyen]

OS X and apple used a modified BSD kernel (they called it Darwin). Also, because of the narrow range of hardware they allow their OS to be installed on, just about all of the modules that would normally be externally loaded are actually compiled in. Apple also kept the standard execution environment used in freeBSD. So, with only minimal patching, you can get most BSD capable sources to compile and run. Their one major difference is the cocoa interface (that nice GEE WIZ visual desktop interface). Its a carry over from the old macintosh days. 

One of the nice things about OS X is also the ability (with a little patching) to run most linux capable binaries. there are even some low level settings to allow linux binaries support to be turned on. Still, given that you have to be a bit more than an ordinary user to work inside the development environment, this will not be for the faint of heart or the inexperienced end user.

The one major frustration I have with OS X is the lack of speech and braille support for any of the X desktop binaries that one can compile out of the macports development environment. About the only things there that are compatible with braille or speech are the command line only utilities. So, if you want to run a later version of firefox that doesn't use the cocoa interface, you are essentially screwed.

-eric

On Mar 23, 2017, at 4:28 PM, Tim Chase wrote:

>> Isn’t mac computers based on bsd too?
> 
> Sorta.  I believe they use the FreeBSD userland utilities, but have
> their own kernel.
> 
> -tim
> 
> 
> 
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