Category: Geeks r Us
I was wondering if we could start a Linux topic, to post recorded demos of your favorite distros. How do they work? How do you install? Are there any good packages up your sleeves? Please, share in either text or audio, it's all good!
thank you for creating this board, seeings how I want to give linix another try outside of vinix after next year when tax return comes back. Plan to by a gaming laptop for VMware purposes.
I haven't tasted the glory of Linux yet.
the only good thing about vinux is that it starts up with orca. other than that, orca is wofully inatiquite.
I do usse command line linux, and some programs like gedit work well with orca, but I gotta say, i hope if you're using gnome that you have some time on your hands to learn orca stuff.
I use GNU/Linux exclusively, and favor Debian, Trisquel, or maybe an older Ubuntu. I find the latest Ubuntu to be a large step backword where accessibility is concerned. We need to work on better beginner documentation, especially for using Orca, . For a starting place, you might consider looking at http://accessiblefreedom.org/wiki. I've written some of the documents on using Orca with Mozilla browsers, the Pidgin messenger and the GNOME 3.4.2 shell, as well as the classic view of GNOME, which I prefer. I use a mixture of GUI apps and command lines, all with Orca providing speech. Whatever Orca's short-comings, there are others who use it for all their accessibility needs.
On that page, what on earth is the MediaWiki, and does it have any audio files on it?
Trisquel how do you get orca up and running?
If you download one of the Trisquel 6 release candidates, burn it to cd or usb key, and boot it, Orca will come up talking, automatically! If you wish to use 5.5, and you get the I18N DVD edition, boot it, and Orca will start. In general, though, When you start a Linux live image, you can start Orca by pressing 'alt+f2' and typing "orca", and hitting 'enter', (no quotes). While Trisquel 5.5 is still there, I suggest, however, getting the 6 release candidates from Here. the files are listed oldest-to-newest. I think the latest is dated 01-December. If later, by the time you read this, get it! Don't get Trisquel Mini, Netinstall, or I18N. I think the image is a bit too big for a cd; use a blank dvd for burning, or a usb key.
Media Wiki is the content management system; it has no audio or video files. This reminds me: I suggest visiting The Accessible Freedom Documentation Wiki.
you rock Dave_H, I will go give this a try. I want to boot camp linix on my mac using one of my 4 external drives, hope this helps. If not I will take your suggestion and get a 64 gig flash drive and just image it out with a bootable linix.
Glad I could help! If you want further discussion or help, send a blank message to support-request@accessiblefreedom.org, with 'subscribe' in the subject. We have a growing, though still small, community. We also have a voice chat server, using Mumble. Monday evenings, beginning around 8 PM EST, there are a few of us there. Drop by any time; you may get lucky. LOL.
Cheers,
Dave H. email: ka1cey@gmail.com
Hi.
I like to playwith linux distros in vms. It's pretty fun to do. I'm not sure whitch one to really use. So far, I've tryed the new ubuntu, whitch is not that accessible to me.
I also tryed sonar, and tresquel. Any others that are worth a shot to test out?
I'm actually considering having it as a second os in the future.
I would recommend Open Suse over Ubuntu 12.10. It's just as easy to install and use as is Ubuntu 12.04 or Trisquel, but it's not Ubuntu-derived. It's also got a huge suite of gui admin tools, bundled in a panel called YaST (yet another setup tool). The official web site is here. For best results, go here, and get the 12.2 GNOME live cd edition. Grab it by torrent for best reliability. There is also a gui-centered derivative of Gentoo called Sabayon Linux. A parting question: Why this persistent idea that GNU/Linux is something to play with rather than something to use?
Hi.
What I mean by playing with them is in a way that literaly, and testing them out to see whitch distro I like best. What version of open suse should I use? I'll test the ones you listed. I did notice a couple problems with sonar. I can't update my package list, and I noticed that in 12.10, office isn't accessible anymore. I can run it, but orca won't speak in it.
The error I get with the update packae thing is something about a public key can't be found or something.
Hi!
I'm not sure what happened with the updater in
sonar; it's not a distro I use much. It's based on Ubuntu 12.10, but with libreofice 3.5, not 3.6. I'd have a look at Trisquel 6.0 relese candidates; they're great; see above for directory with development builds. If you ant a look at Open Suse, get the 12.2 GNOME live cd. I think you'll appreciate its stibility, eas of use, and package selection, to name a few things. Remember that, in Open Suse, you have to start Orca manualy when the live system is booted. I'd give it about a minute to start; yes, I know its shartup and shutdown are slow.
Cheers,
Dave H. for email and chat
Dave, two quick questions for you, as you seem to be the most knoledgable about linux.
I have an older desktop (acer aspire t135) that I want to set up with linux.
First question:
I have a vinux live usb that I've been trying to install on it. It's a 32 bit image, and it works with every computer I've tried it on except for the one I want to install it on.
The boot menu comes up and it gets stuck at the pre-boot screen. The time on the menu goes down to 1 second and then it just stays there. I boot this computer with other usb's all the time, so can't really figure what the problem is
Second, I am very interested in making linux a useful part of my computing, as I feel that it's a necesary skill I need for getting a job when I'm out of college. With that said, with all the distros floating around out there, can you give me a recommendation of a good one to use for my specific needs?
I've been reading a lot of books about command line linux, and am becoming pretty comfortable with the command line use. I want to use the gui portion of linux for daily tasks like email, twitter, web browsing, etc.
I'm using the old acer as a test machine, it has a gig of ram, and about a 1ghz processor. It's not the newest computer, but it's fast enough to run windows xp with no trouble, so I'm sure there's a distro out there I can use effectively.
I'd like to switch more and more to using linux, and become comfortable enough with it to be efficient with its use by the time I get out of college in a year.
Thanks so much for all the great info you've put on this board, and I hope to hear more of the sonar podcast here soon. It's a really great resource, and you guys have done a killer job with it so far.
Thanks
Hi roxtar,
I use Linux as well. I'd say in your case for your particular system, you can use either Debian 7 with cli and gui without PulseAudio or Arch Linux which does have a talking installer. Arch Linux may be harder to get up and running. Since it takes sometime to do the initial install. I've got a list of instructions to get Debian 7 working with full accessibility without PulseAudio. Here's the link for them:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2012-August/msg00285.html
I'd suggest using a system (with pulse audio) such as Trisquel 6.0, Open Suse 12.2, or Ubuntu 12.04. Note: Trisquel may have trouble with your hardware, most-likely wifi card that requires non-free firmware binary blob. These live gui systems all work on my Asus netbook, which has 1 GB of ram and a dual-core Atom cpu. You'll have plenty of access to the gui; if you wish a console-only system, that can be done, too. Debian (Wheezy) is also a good choice. If you choose this, I suggest you do the network install; it doesn't have a live option with a decent installer, but may offer better control of the apps you choose to put in. If, for instance, yu don't choose the Desktop application group, you'll end up with a console system that talks. To get the Debian console system talking, hit 's' when the cd image is booted..
In my not-so-humble opinion, this "remove pulse audio" obsession is much like telling a user of Win "reboot", and her problems are solved.
Hi Dave,
I gave the Debian link as an option to the poster who had asked about his system. I myself might either use OpenSuse 12.2 or Trisquel 6. Since Ubuntu 10.04's updates will stop soon. Though I will miss Voxin in OpenSuse. I can't get used to listening to ESpeak for long stretches of time.
Got ya!
I'm nudging people away from Ubuntu 12.10, since I find much of the accessibility broken and don't appreciate commercial spyware in my ui. !2.04 will be supported for 5 years, and is a decent and stable platform, though the leading edge of GNOME is way out there, and not sure where it's headed, but moving fast. Would you consider joining the Monday night mumble sessions or the Sonar Radio podcast?
Hi Dave,
I might take it under consideration, since I did do my OCP Database Admin studies on both RHEL 5 which was rather interesting, and Ubuntu 10.04 which wasn't bad.
Oracle officially supports SuSE and not any Debian based distro. They have their own version of RHEL which isn't accessible and uses old packages, no matter how stable they may be. That's the main reason I lean towards OpenSuSE as opposed to Trisquel.
I'll ask the Voxin seller if it is possible to port Voxin to OpenSuSE. I do believe that the Vinux instructions that I gave a while back for Orca XDesktop might work for other GDM 3 distros since the directories are the same.
Sometimes, I wonder if I should move to Open Suse, especially given the speed at which GNOME moves? Looks like one can add the Tumbleweed repositories for GNOME and any other package set(s) one would like to have in a rolling state? Have you had experience with anything from Tumbleweed? My experience with Factory, well, let's say, I still have PTSD when I think about it. LOL. That said, Suse gives one a great range of choices for the kind of experience you want-- long-term very stable, to "it might break at any time" kind of release. The Suse documentation seems like the best I've seen in GNU/Linux world. And then there's YaST; that thing's amazing and scary-powerful.
Hi Dave,
I'll look into OpenSuSE and see how it likes my system. I don't mind getting the pure gnome version of it. Can you use Classic Gnome or Fallback Gnome on it as you can with Trisquel or Sonar?
In Open Suse 12.2, you can switch to the fallback session, it's done in the 'graphics' branch, on the 'details' panel in System Settings. There's a toggle called 'force fallback'. The default is to have it unchecked, if your graphics hardware can handle the 3D accelleration. I understand that, in GNOME 3.6, there is a regression re: GNOME Panel; when an applet is added, moved, or removed, the panel becomes inaccessible, until next Orca restart. I notice, in 12.2, there's an active system service for the screen reader, SBL, but I don't know how to get it working. I know it can use software speech; it works in Knoppix.
I'm pretty sure I"m gonna try open suse. it sounds pretty good for what I want. I'd do trisquel, but I think you're probably right about the wifi adapter not being supported. It's supported in ubuntu, but it is a pretty non-standard little belkin wireless adapter, so I doubt trisquel would play nicely with it.
Also, can somebody fill me in on what the deal is whth pulse audio? DO people not like it just because of espeak?
I have used espeak with ubuntu quite a bit, and didn't find it too bad. I also have used it with nvda a fair bit.
Just curious if there are any espeak alternatives out there that can work on linux based systems.
I think the issues with pulse audio have more to do with running speakup console review, along with orca and things. If you just run the gui or just the console, you're fine. Now that the latency is gone, pulse is fine for anything I'd want to do. Regarding Trisquel and Suse, you can always give Trisquel a try; if you can find your wifi using the live cd, you'll be able to find it on the installed system. No harm in trying.
I'm installing open suse 12.2 today. Wish me luck.
Everything seems good to go so far with the live cd.
I wish you success in your journey into GNU/linux Land!
Here's one thing:
The first time you boot the installed Open Suse, you may have no sound. Power down and reboot. Start orca with the 'alt+f2' and type 'orca'. To make the screen reader start automatically on login, visit 'system settings' and choose 'universal access'. From there, look for the 'screen reader' checkbox, and toggle it on. Thereafter, you'll have an accessible session on every startup.