Re: [orca-list] An Open Letter to Oracle on the Topic Of Accessibility

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

Hello Al and anyone else interested in this,
Yes good question why am I thinking of opensolaris? I have a handful of 
reasons, I will try and list them. As a extra note, it doesn't mean I am 
leaving GRML, it does very well as a LiveCD system, with respect to Tony 
and others working on vinux, I don't really see the need for a command 
line vinux while GRML exists (the only advantage of vinux would be no 
special options at the boot prompt but I seem to have got that bit 
mastered, but if you can boot from USB you can create a GRML LiveUSB and 
set default options). My problems possibly come after installing GRML, 
while it is possible to manage a GRML2HD installation you do sometimes 
get apt complaining about conflicts, etc. Also GRML is based on debian 
unstable which isn't always desirable.

Anyway back to opensolaris:
* OpenSolaris has possibly the best gnome integration with orca you can 
find. This isn't to say other distros aren't possible to get a good set 
up but it may be harder to get there.
* OpenSolaris uses some great technologies, eg. service management 
facility (SMF) instead on run levels, ZFS and boot environments (this 
means you can take a snapshot of the OS at a time and make it available 
to boot from and have another environment which may be a updated one, 
good for the occasions if you do an update or change an important 
setting as you can boot back to before the change if things fail), 
possibly most important for orca users the sound is based on OSS4 and it 
doesn't use pulseaudio and many other features I probably haven't got to 
know about. It feels like the idea is solve the actual problem rather 
than paper over the cracks (eg. basing sound system on OSS4 rather than 
trying to solve the problems with pulseaudio).
* It feels like it has more of a single direction and way of doing 
things, none of that Linux distribution stuff where things may or may 
not vary between distros so never quite knowing if information you find 
online applies to your situation. I know this might not feel so good to 
some who like choice, but at least it can get rid of those cases where 
software needs compatibility layers to work with your setup (eg. 
applications written to output audio through OSS but you use ALSA or the 
other way round, Solaris has a single recommended audio API). Also see 
comments below about what I intended to use OpenSolaris for.
* Has releases, should be at a regular timescale of every six months but 
looking back they haven't really kept to that. Again see what I intend 
to use OpenSolaris for to see why it may be desirable.

OK, so what was I wanting to use it for? I was most likely going to use 
it on my laptop, not wanting to lug a hardware synthesiser around (mine 
is an apollo) I will be limited to speech in user space regardless of if 
speakup is available or not (NOTE: speakup will not work on Solaris, it 
isn't Linux, YASR should work fine in a virtual console so I could have 
a text based screen reader on Solaris). Also as some people have 
commented on the problem they have had with Linux is knowing where to 
find information on how to use it once installed, I was considering may 
be producing some further tutorials on various tasks with orca. For that 
I wanted a fairly well defined system I would be working on and 
OpenSolaris seemed to offer that.

Having said the above, for personal needs, I have looked at other Linux 
distros, archlinux, opensuse and fedora (I have tried gentoo a long time 
back in the past and slackware was one of the first systems I used but 
it doesn't come with gnome). I quite like debian and archlinux, building 
up a system from a very small base system is quite good and offers me 
flexibility in what packages I want to use. Actually my playing with 
archlinux is probably very interesting, I installed it from a GRML 
LiveCD (look at the arch wiki about how to install from an existing 
Linux system), that's how much I like GRML as a live system. The other 
interesting thing with me trying arch was I set it up as a OSS4 system, 
seems to work well except not all packages are compiled to work well 
with OSS4 (eg. espeakup doesn't seem to work well, I had to go the 
speechd-up and speech-dispatcher route).

coming back to if I were to produce tutorials, my quick look at fedora 
12 would tempt me to use that if I were concentrating only on orca 
stuff. The LiveCD seems to work reasonably well, there are a few issues 
(the biggest is starting the installer, its back to using su to become 
root, quitting orca and starting orca as root and then starting the 
installer, the other issues have some sort of work around eg. the only 
supplied TTS is festival but you can install espeak into the live system 
and then switch to that). I have said its good if mainly working in 
gnome as it uses pulseaudio (they seem to have it working well in gnome 
but I don't know how well it would work outside gnome in a text console 
with a screen reader) and also for the other reason that while redhat 
say about the accessibility speakup gives they don't provide it in fedora.

Hope this gives people a view of where I am coming from and what I like.

Michael Whapples

On 02/24/2010 02:14 AM, al Sten-Clanton wrote:
> Hi, Michael.
>
> Because you've been helpful to me in particular and to users of GRML
> generally, I have a question that springs from both simple curiosity and the
> desire to keep a eye out for new perspectives.
>
> Are you seeking to use opensolaris in place of GRML, or along with it and
> perhaps for different endeavors?  I'm using Arch Linux for now, and
> generally like it, especially its stability in comparison to GRML
> (respecting the results of upgrade).  I retain a considerable fondness for
> GRML, however.  All that said, does opensolaris have advantages over these
> variants of Linux or even Linux as a whole?  Or, are there still other
> options you're considering?
>
> Thanks for any information you may think it useful for me to have.
>
> Al
>
>