Re: [orca-list] orca out of the box

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

I beg to differ on the usability of Karmic. I'm actually running it here 
with no trouble. The trick is to not remove pulseaudio, but instead 
bypass it in speech-dispatcher by changing the AudioOutputMethod line so 
that it says:

AudioOutputMethod "oss"

Using the OSS emulation in ALSA seems to bypass pulseaudio entirely, 
even if it's integrated into the ALSA configuration. That being said, I 
do have a SoundBlaster Live installed here as well, so that may be 
contributing somewhat to my more positive experience. Also, having come 
from all the bugs I used to experience in Windows using Jaws about 7 
years ago and having started out with Slackware Linux on the command 
line with no hope of using the graphical interface at the time, I guess 
I'm used to the seemingly smaller number of workarounds I have to use to 
make Karmic work, which is definitely better than what we had access to 
when we first got Gnopernicus. Regressions, unfortunately, are a part of 
software development. I just try to report the problems I have and 
hopefully they will be fixed in the near future. We certainly have a 
better response than Jaws users did when Windows 95 was released and 
there was no Jaws that was compatible with it until late 1996, even 
though Jaws was finally somewhat stable on Windows 3.1 at the time. Any 
breakage in Linux/GNOME/Orca seems to be met with quick responses and 
fixes, and nothing seems to break so bad that a year and a half goes by 
without a fix or even basic compatibility, unlike what happens if 
Microsoft/Freedom Scientific/GW Micro breaks something.

Kyle
--
 Jesus you're my life.
I live only to serve You
 Each and every day.
--Kyle