Re: [orca-list] Reporting a Specific Bug, plus a Terminal question whilst at it

[Bill Cox <waywardgeek gmail com>]

Hi, Chris.  I've heard of a similar situation from another Vinux user,
but I'm not sure what's going on.  If you can log back into his system
for a bit, there's some more debugging to do, all related to
pulseaudio.

First, run "sudo restorespeech".  This should re-install speakup, and
this will probably break sound in gnome on these systems after a
reboot.  Assuming that's the case, let's investigate what's up with
pulseaudio in gnome.  Do a 'ps -fe | grep pulse', and verify that
there's only one copy of pulseaudio running, and that it's running as
the user "pulse".  Assuming this is the case, check out
/var/log/messages.  Go to the end, and look backwards for 'pulse'.
Ignore lines that say something like:

ratelimit.c: 68 events suppressed

Look instead for a line like:

PA in system mode

There should be a warning in there saying your probably running
pulseaudio incorrectly, but that's normal.  Just before or after this
may be some interesting clues.

Next, verify that your system has the delay of 4 seconds in
/etc/init.d/pulseaudio.  We have had problems with virtual machines
and some laptops where pulseaudio starts before the sound card is
ready, and so pulseaudio fails to start.  I added a "sleep 4" line as
a hack to get around this.  You can try changing that to "sleep 8" to
see if it does anything.

If you like, I can pop into one of these machines through ssh to see
what's going on.  You can securely port-forward your ssh port to my
server with:

ssh -p7602 -R 2222:localhost:22 -N noob waywardgeek net

Sina is building a handy remote support application that will do this
automatically when users press a specific key combination in Vinux, so
that if users have Internet access, they can get help.  We're also
looking for volunteers who are willing to help debug problems on
user's machines.  My guess is you would be great at this, and we could
really use your help!  We're calling the support team the "Vinux Guru"
team.  You get to access remote machines through guru waywardgeek net 
 Everything is logged on the server, so we have a complete trail of
what happens in a support session.  Let me know if you're interested.

Bill