Re: [orca-list] Orca and *nix distros

[trev saunders gmail com]

Hi,

this is an interesting question, which unfortunitely, I don't have a great answer for.  The first question I 
would ask is what do you consider "easy to install".  What you consider easy has a large effect on what you 
should use.

In general my known preference is for debian or gentoo.  As much as I'd rather not do this if you believe 
easy means very easy, and don't mind not having much control, I may have to suggest ubuntu, or vinux which I 
tend to see as ubuntu with some special patches.

Debian's installer is fairly accessible, if you need software speech, you'll have to use a testing installer 
at people.debian.org/~sthibault/ hopefully this will make it into the stable installer for squeeze when that 
is realesed soon.  THe good news here is that you have some other install options, if you can use braille, or 
a hardware synth, the standard installer will work well.  This installer is a simple text based installer, it 
asks about 10 questions, mostly language /time partition arangement, and what groups of software you'd like 
to install.  You can also boot from a livecd and install using debootstrap.  If you install with debootstrap 
the install looks something like this boot from livecd, gentoo and grml provide good livecds with software 
speech.  After booting from the livecd you partition the disks, make filesystems, run debootstrap to install 
a basic system install a kernel, stealing the livecd's is a good trick, edit a few files for your preticular 
setup, and
  installgrub as a boot loader.  If you use the installer, selecting the desktop task for installation will 
install gnome and orca.  If you go the debootstrap route, once the system is up and running running apt-get 
install gnome  as root will bring in all of orca which is probably more than you want, but gets orca and 
gnome.  I have found debian testing to be very stable, and fairly recent the gnome packages are currently 
mixed between 2.28 and 2.30 for example.

Gentoo's install proccess is technically more complicated, but accesibility wise the situation is simpler, 
the cd you install from a minimal livecd works well, comes with software or hardware speech using speakup.  I 
have no knowledge abut braille with brltty.  The install process is a bit like installing debian with 
debootstrap, however there is much more documentation, in the form of the gentoo handbook at 
www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml.  The process starts the same way, setup the livecd's networking 
so you can download packages, partition and format the disks, setting encrypted partitions and lvm if you 
like.  Then unpack a stage 3 tar ball and portage snapshot for a minimal system, customize some 
configurations such as networking and /etc/fstab which tells the system where different parts of the 
filesystem are located.  You then configure a kenrel, there are scrypts that make this very easy, and install 
a bootloader.  As for gnome and orca, I haven't done thi
 s yet so others may know more.  The packaging system on gentoo is that /usr/portage contains a number of 
files witch the package manager emerge uses to download the source for packages, and configure and build them 
as you customize with use flags (withc are great! if you don't need some part of a package you can disable it 
and get ride of the dependencies).

HTH
Trev