Re: [orca-list] about the new sonar distro

[Jonathan Nadeau <j nadeau charter net>]

Wow! Doug thanks for the compliment. i'm glad you are enjoying Sonar! If 
you would like to talk on mangler myself and some others meet on Monday 
nights at 8 p.m. eastern standard time. You can find the mangler info at

http://www.accessiblefreedom.org

On 08/31/2012 03:03 PM, Doug Smith wrote:
> Hi, everyone, this is Doug Smith.  Lately, I have been made aware of 
> the new sonar Linux distro for the blind.  I have to tell everyone 
> this.  I am using it right now, installed on my production machine and 
> I am liking what I am seeing.
>
> I have to give you a really honest opinion of the distro, and I will.  
> There are several characteristics of the system that I really like.
>
> 1. I got the classic version and it is running like a top.  On the 
> stock ubuntu with unity 2d, I seem to have had a problem when pressing 
> return immediately after entering something into the dash panel.  On 
> the other hand, I had a few accessibility problems with it.  Not 
> here.  This thing is running so fast that, I would have thought it was 
> a new machine if I hadn't know any better.
>
> 2. ease of installation: This system was so much faster to get 
> installed than the stock ubuntu, I couldn't believe it.  Real good 
> stuff!!
>
> 3. On the stock ubuntu with unity 2d, the graphical desktop locked up 
> on me.  This really ticks me off, as this kind of thing has been a 
> problem since I started working with talking computers 27 years ago 
> this month and I still see it sometimes.  It happens a lot less in 
> text mode than graphical.  Not on here.  This thing has not hung on me 
> one single time.  It's really great.
>
> 4. Orca never drops on here.  It didn't on the regular ubuntu 
> neither.  I want to congratulate the Orca development team on stopping 
> that idiotic crashing behavior Orca used to have.  It's running smooth 
> as silk.
>
> On the stock ubuntu with unity 2d, the keyboard shortcuts I had to set 
> myself were constantly coming undone.  I couldn't depend on alt-tab or 
> alt-f4 to be working from session to session.  When I found out that I 
> had to remove the ~/.gconf/apps/metacity directory from my home 
> folder, I thought all would be well.  It wasn't.  I still fought a 
> running battle with the window manager over writing its config to my 
> home directory.  Then I fixed it. It was a dirty hack and a major 
> cludge, but it worked.  I removed this file then, as root, did this:
>
> touch ./.gconf/apps/metacity
>
> and this created the new file to replace the configuration directory.  
> Well, that wasn't good enough, so I had to put it back and using the 
> chmod command, remove all permissions, read, write, and execute from 
> all users.  Problem solved.  Not on here.  All the keyboard shortcuts 
> have stayed around, even after upgrading the system.  It's great.
>
> 6. On the other side, ubuntu with unity 2d, the sound continually 
> muted out on its own from session to session.  I have never seen this 
> in my life, and I am not sure if any of you have or not, so I will 
> attempt to describe it.  Turn on the machine and do some work. All 
> will be well.  When the machine was turned off and allowed to cool 
> overnight, then restarted again the next day to do other things, no 
> sound.  I had to have some eyes in here so many times it was really 
> getting bad.  Well, adding pavucontrol and the ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev 
> repository together solved the problem.  No more pulseaudio problems.  
> I also did this on here, and pulseaudio is really not all that 
> hideous.  It works perfectly well except for the distortion for a few 
> seconds when it starts.  How does pulseaudio avoid this on the live 
> cd? I guess it's just because it's so slow in getting Orca and friends 
> started that all that must be out of its system before you hear it.
>
> 7.  This sonar stuff has a really good and fast boot time even though 
> I have a few extra daemons on here which start at boot time, this 
> thing really starts up fast.
>
> I hope the author of sonar gets this.  I want to talk to him on 
> mangler or something and let him know personally, rather than just in 
> writing how good this distro is.  Please keep gnome classic on this 
> system, and you've got a lifelong user.  If the sighted world is going 
> to tell me that I have to use a graphical desktop on my machine just 
> to get hold of the same functionality and information everyone else 
> has access to, I'll be shot down in flames if they're going to tell me 
> what OS or desktop to use.  And, by the way, thunderbird accessibility 
> on here is perfect.  I'm using it to write this message right now.
>
>
> I just have one question about thunderbird.  How do you set it up such 
> that all the messages in a thread are not transmitted back and forth 
> every time you send a mail?  I hate that with a passion and I hope 
> someone can tell me how to set it up such that I just send what I 
> wrote and not a quadrilion other messages attached onto it each time I 
> post to a list.
>
>
>
> Thanks.