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

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

OK, trying to force this back to being well on topic, what do certain 
things like ZFS and SMF mean for accessibility. As Joanie says, 
snapshots and BEs allow me to back away from a totally broken system 
with no pain, this compares to Linux where I need to rely on a more 
basic tool such as speakup, brltty, etc to try and work out why the 
system is broke and what I should do to fix it. For this reason I feel 
the need for a text console is much less and as I said if need be I have 
YASR. The only thing is that I can't be so helpful to developers on what 
broke my system, eg. one of the dev builds of opensolaris doesn't start 
gnome on my laptop (I think its probably video issues) but I am unable 
to get error messages for developers. As for SMF (once mastered) it 
seems to promise the ability not only to start and stop services but 
also to monitor them if required and restart them should they fail, just 
imagine that, if speech-dispatcher were to fail it could be started 
automatically again... same goes for brltty but I can't think of an 
instance where brltty has died on me (well done brltty developers, 
amazing work).

Also, Joanie, I hadn't realised about the work done with the package 
manager and accessibility, possibly a model of how accessibility in 
applications can be done.

Putting the politics of oracle aside, here is what I don't like about 
opensolaris for accessibility. While the sound system is based on OSS4, 
it isn't plain OSS4 so you don't have all the standard OSS4 drivers 
available, in short soundcard support still lacks compared to Linux 
(unfortunately with orca generally no sound card no speech). Not having 
a way to read a console level error message when gnome fails to start or 
crashes is not helpful as you can't submit a useful bug report and ask 
for it to be fixed (may be there's a way to get messages written to disk 
and then recovered by booting a working BE, its sometimes just finding 
these features if they exist). I don't think YASR can be used for 
logging in to a text console, I think you must launch it after logging 
in, so a bit of crossing your fingers, realising you can't type with 
crossed fingers so uncrossing them, logging in and hoping its done it 
fine and then starting the screen reader.

Michael Whapples

Michael Whapples
On 02/25/2010 12:03 AM, Joanmarie Diggs wrote:
> Hey all.
>
> I don't want to add too much on to something that's venturing on the
> outskirts of off-topicness, but since Michael has mentioned my OS of
> choice, and since it's recently been suggested that perhaps the
> community would be better served were I to work more regularly in
> Linux....
>
> On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 22:47 +0000, Michael Whapples wrote:
> [...]
>    
> > * 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),
> >      
> This is one of the main things I love about OpenSolaris. No matter what
> you do, to your files, to your system, to anything, you can always go
> back.
>
> For instance, if I wanted to test something bleeding edge, say Gtk+ from
> master, I could take a snapshot, install the latest Gtk+ along with all
> its dependencies, try it, and then rollback to my snapshot and it's like
> I never installed Gtk+ and friends. On the other hand, if I needed to be
> able to regularly use that environment, I'd instead create a new boot
> environment in which to install the latest Gtk+, etc. Then I could
> choose my stable environment or the bleeding edge one any time I wanted
> from Grub -- or from the more accessible, recently-modified shutdown
> dialog.
>
> You also automatically get a new boot environment each time there's an
> OpenSolaris update, so you cannot get yourself into the aforementioned,
> totally broken state you can with a Linux update. Like Michael said, you
> just boot into the last good BE and everything's fine again. Although,
> as a related aside, in my experience even the dev builds of OpenSolaris
> are extremely stable.
>
> When I need to use Ubuntu for Orca-related tasks, I now do so via a
> VirtualBox install within OpenSolaris. That way, when a sudo apt-get
> upgrade results in an unusable system, which often occurs in the early,
> unstable stages, I don't have to try to fix it -- or reinstall Ubuntu
> completely -- which I used to have to do as a full-time Ubuntu user. I
> just locate my $HOME/.VirtualBox snapshot in Nautilus, restore it to the
> Desktop, and then replace the screwed up one. Then it's like I never did
> the upgrade and can immediately get back to work.
>
> Which all boils down to this: I cannot tell you how much time and
> aggravation ZFS has saved me.  And the time I save not having to
> troubleshoot and then fix -- or reinstall -- my development environment
> is time I can spend on actual development.
>
> The other plug I'll give is to the package manager which, unlike some
> software centers which shall remain nameless, is extremely accessible. I
> can take a modicum of credit for that because I test nearly every
> proposed change to the GUI before it's committed. However, the PM guys
> themselves are extremely committed to accessibility -- one of the
> developers in a previous life happens to be one of the original Atk
> authors, which probably doesn't hurt. :-) Regardless.... It's been the
> case nearly 100% of the time that if I file an a11y bug against PM in
> the evening, there is a proposed fix by the morning, which is committed
> at the very latest that afternoon. Seriously. If we had that sort of
> commitment to accessibility from 'mainstream' developers across the
> board, can you imagine how much better life would be?
>
> Speaking of which, I have a little unexpected free time, so I need to
> work on a couple of issues within WebKitGtk because otherwise a software
> center which shall remain nameless will continue to also be rather
> useless for Orca users. :-(
>
> Jumping down from my soapbox.... NOW!<grin>
> --joanie
>
>