Hi All A bad news, good news story. I have spent the past 6 hours with a very experienced sighted hand trying to install Ubuntu onto my PC. Firstly, the CD, which was burned today, ran well as a Live CD. However, we hit a major problem with the install onto the PC. The PC set up was a Windows XP on the master IDE 20Gb drive and a slave IDE was set up with 4 20GB partitions. 3 in use and one left unformatted for Ubuntu to be loaded into. Got through the initial set up stages OK to the point where it starts to load in the CD and it got as far as 56% and hung. It was left for about 30 minutes and had progressed no further. Machine was hard re-booted. Ubuntu re-loaded and it became apparent that instead of limiting itself to the 20Gb partition reserved for it, it had re-formatted the entire hard drive - this secondary hard drive was my data drive and irreplaceable data had fortunately been backed up. My friend was totally baffled as to why this had happened - he has carried out a number of Ubuntu installs over the past month with no problems - the major difference being mine was the only one that he was placing Ubuntu on a secondary drive in an available partition as opposed to the master drive on a virgin system. We tried a second time and this time we got to 66% before hanging. In desperation he went home and got a copy of Zubuntu (I think) and we tried that. Yipee, sailed through with no problems. This meant that once installed we had to apt-get gnome and orca in its entirety. Although everything is now on we are still having problems with getting things to work together and that will be thursday evenings project. So, can I ask a couple of things? Is Ubuntu sensitive to where it is installed? Does it prefer a virgin system to one that is already occupied? Secondly, and I think this relates to Gnupernicus as opposed to Orca although by this stage we were getting quite confused, there are lots of spin boxes relating to the different talk rates for different controls - could this be hidden behind an Advanced tab and have maybe one or two that effects all the options? As for Orca, again I think, we noted that if the check box relating to key echo was unticked Orca stopped responding. Lastly, relating to Gnome Mag, can someone point me to the URL for directions on it's use please? In particular looking for activating full screen magnification, colour inversion to read white on black, together with associated keyboard shortcuts. It looks fun from what little I can see but at the moment frustration is high as I can't do anything much with anything! Many thanks Ian
<<attachment: winmail.dat>>