Re: the best way to start gnome

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Regarding starting gnopernicus and accessibility in gnome:
> > As a blind individual it is difficult to get things started this way.
GNOME's settings (and those in gnopernicus) are primarily controlled by 
something called "gconf".  Another non-deprecated way of setting these 
keys is to use the "gconftool-2" command, which I believe you can do 
from a text console while your gnome session is running in the graphical 
console.  Once you have set a gconf key, its value will persist through 
your subsequent sessions (unless something else, like using a dialog, 
changes it).  The accessibility key is turned on by:

gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility true

You can ask for gnopernicus to start up at each login with this command:

gconftool-2 -t list --list-type=string -s 
/desktop/gnome/accessibility/startup/exec_ats [gnopernicus]

And you can tell gnopernicus whether to use speech, braille, or 
magnification (or all of the above) with these keys:

/apps/gnopernicus/srcore/mag_active
/apps/gnopernicus/srcore/sp_active
/apps/gnopernicus/srcore/br_active

You'll need to set them via gconftool-2, using the "-s" (set) command, 
and "-t" (type) "bool" (boolean), i.e.

gconftool-2 -t bool -s /apps/gnopernicus/srcore/sp_active true

I believe that by default gnopernicus will enable both speech and 
braille, and will attempt to speak the initial dialog with the buttons 
mentioned in a previous post.  But in some configurations the default 
voice settings may not work well, or your braille device might not be 
recognized, so this won't always provide a good "bootstrapping" 
solution.  In such cases, you can use the commandline method above.

regards,

Bill