Re: [orca-list] speakup not speaking

[Mallory van Achterberg <stommepoes stommepoes nl>]

Hi,
You could say Windows isn't really something that you can just
casually walk into either, depending on what you're doing. Recently
the mother-in-law had no network connection and after husband did
some troubleshooting (he's former sysadmin) it turned out somehow
a soundblaster mod somehow blocked network. The two have nothing
to do with each other. This was Windows Vista *shrug*

I'm no knowledgeable Linux user, but much of the time I can follow
instructions online, because I do have some basic knowledge, and if I
can learn it then pretty much anyone can.

No Starch Press I believe has an excellent book called How Linux
Works, but if you understand the basic setup then instructions make
more sense.
http://www.aboutdebian.com/linux.htm I thought this was pretty helpful even though it focusses on Debian and 
Debian does some things
differently (every Distro does little things differently).
I can't get this URL to load today but this is also handy:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
How any typical Linux filesystem is structured. Knowing the structure
and where you're likely to find types of things is very helpful.

Last, find anywhere online to learn bash basics and one text editor.
With those, you can follow pretty much any instructions.

Sorry I pulled this a bit off-topic. Since Orca gets updated often
enough I wouldn't encourage you to use a super stable but old distro
like Debian stable (2 years is a long time), but I'm using wheezy
testing and no, I'm not testing anything, and most things are okay.
But one reason Ubuntu is so popular is it's 6-month updated stable
Debian-based releases. There are users on this list doing well with
Open Suse and Fedora it seems, and Arch (but Arch is for Linux people
who like to build their own :-)
Vinux is also regularly-updated stables and also made more for newbie
users compared to the likes of Arch. 
But any system will be easier for you to deal with unexpecteds like
Speakup vanishing if you're more comfortable with Linux in general.

If you use a package manager (rather than downloading a tarball) to
(re)install Speakup, the terminal will say something like "no updates"
or "no newer versions" if you already have it somewhere. Package
managers know where all the bits need to go and usually know if you
already have something installed.

-Mallory

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 04:26:09PM -0800, Justin Harford wrote:
> I am getting the impression that linux really isn't something that you can just casually walk in to, unless 
> you just don't care to have a computer that runs well. I'm going to look for some "linux for dummies" 
> manuals -- I doubt if they will help me with the speakup problem -- but it might be useful. Right now when 
> I read online instructions, I don't really understand any of the terminology that they are using, so in the 
> end the online documentation is proving rather useless.