[orca-list] Intro and Issues

[James Dietz <jdietz oberlin edu>]

Hi everyone.  I'm James, and I've been interested in Linux for a while  
(only using it on and off for about a year).  I've been a long time  
windows user, reasonably accomplished mac person and moderate newbie  
linux user.  If you want to know anything else (perhaps as a part of  
some sort of initiation ceremony) let me know.

I've recently purchased an Asus Eeepc 1000 (with the apparently  
inaccessible xandros).  In order to prepare myself to use Ubuntu full- 
time I installed it once again on my reasonably powerful Toshiba (1.8  
ghz mobile processor, 1 gig of ram, which is comparable to the 1.6 ghz  
atom and 1 gig of ram on the new Eee) and have had a much smoother  
time than I have on either 7.10 gutsy or 8.04 hardy ubuntu releases.   
Sure the internet is a little sluggish (especially when navigating in  
reverse by webpage element for some reason) but it worked for me.   
I've found that on the netbook things are significantly slower and the  
fan starts up only a few minutes of using firefox and other apps with  
speech.  This isn't a problem as it has worked (though a tiny bit more  
loudly than I would've liked).

After having lots of issues (mostly results of my hacking around --  
moving home directory onto it's own partition post-install was a  
particular problem) I thought I had a moderately  stable system...  
until Orca started randomly baling out on me.  The past few times I've  
booted the Eee, gnome starts fine (I get the login sound), orca boots  
up, I go on the net to do some thing or other and either in the middle  
of a sentence or while not speaking in the first place speech drops  
out.  Rebooting X, running "orca" in the "run application" dialog gets  
me nowhere.  Usually rebooting X, running "killall orca" followed by a  
restart worked fine under the old toshiba but not now for some  
reason.  X reboots and I get the login sound but no orca!  I have to  
power down the Eee, power it up and then I only get a few minutes of  
usage. I don't think it's an espeak issue (as I can get espeak to talk  
through the run dialog post-orca-crash) and I don't know enough about  
gnome-speech to start investigating there.

After searching the archives I've found that pulseaudio (the audio  
system I'm using as gnome-speech doesn't like cooperating with other  
sound-playing apps even alsa ones, and speech-dispatcher is far too  
buggy for me to use regularly) is apparently not optimal for  
screenreading goodness and in some cases has been a cause of random  
speech dropouts.  Should I bother either uninstalling the pulseaudio  
package and using the aoss wrapper for gnome-speech (even though  
pulseaudio has solved lots of interop issues I've had with plane ol'  
alsa and other audio apps like audacious and saytime) or is this not  
likely to be the problem?  I know this doesn't seem related, but I'm  
shooting in the dark: like I said I use gnome-speech, but on trying to  
use speech-dispatcher the espeak module was inexplicably replaced by  
the "dummy" module, giving me the same generic error message whenever  
orca wanted to speak.

I'll do some more snooping on this issue tomorrow, but since sighted  
assistance is not always around (and is probably annoyed at the  
extensive help I've needed over the past few days) and it will be a  
little while before I go back to school (where i can use the braille  
display and brltty for some raw terminal goodness) I thought I'd ask  
the list.   I've been on a 3-week running streak of not-using-windows,  
and I'd like to keep it up (for reasons both monetary and snobbish).   
I actually intend to help out others, rather than just post and  
disappear; who knows - I know a decent amount about the command line  
and related tools (enough to solve lots of woes I've had swapping  
partitions and crap over the past few days) and I'd like to learn more  
about linux myself.

In excited anticipation,
James