In order to access the CVS version of Speak Freely, you'll need to have the CVS package for your distribution of Linux installed. While you should read the man page for the CVS system, the following two command lines will get you the latest CVS version of the Speak Freely source code.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@linux-speakup.org:/usr/src/CVS login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@linux-speakup.org:/usr/src/CVS checkout speak_freely

Note: When you are asked for a password, use the word 'please' as the password. Also note that the /usr/src/CVS part of the command is case sensitive.

Blind people find Speak Freely to be a very useful means of exchanging realtime voice audio as well as electronic chat messages. The audio uses gsm compression and is quite good. Recent enhancements to Speak Freely have included a chat history, a "who is on" feature to list the names of folks on the reflector, and a "look whose listening feature" to display the actual html page for the reflector. Both of these last two features are hard coded to point at the the Speak Freely site, and there needs to be a way to make these user configurable. Also, there needs to be some paging code to handle the display of the html reflector page, which currently just scrolls off the screen if it is to long.

If you are interested in participating in the Speak Freely project, either contributing new or modified source, or perhaps writing documentation, please checkout the cvs source, and contact either Kirk Reiser or Jim Danley.

John Covici has also compiled an enhanced version of the Windows version of Speak Freely, which is located in the /pub/linux/goodies area of our ftp site or from our download page. You can contact John at covici@ccs.covici.com for more information.