[orca-list] Manually setting up Gnome or Unity in Archlinux, Gentoo or Debian

[Cleverson Casarin Uliana <clever92000 yahoo com br>]

Dear,

I have just bought a new machine. I thought of installing Ubuntu 12.04 
on it, but the live CD apparently doesn't fit well on the machine, e.g., 
sound comes up muted. In addition, I like more customizabe distros, and 
I have installed ArchLinux and Gentoo in the past.

I want to set up a minimal desktop, not necessarily for daily use, but 
mainly for maintenance purposes. For example, I want the GParted 
partition editor, since console apps like parted cannot resize NTFS 
partitions. When I last tried ArchLinux and Gentoo, it was about time of 
Gnome 2.30 and 2.32 and I had some problems I couldn't solve. I didn't 
know how to configure Orca for administrative tasks, I couldn't make 
Orca speak on GDM, and I didn't know how to make applications launch 
with root privileges when called from a menu, like Ubuntu does, and 
instructions on the Orca site were outdated.

Thus, I'd like to know what is for the moment the best desktop you would 
indicate in terms of reliability and access with Orca, that is not hard 
to set up in a distro like ArchLinux or Gentoo or Debian? Do you know 
the current necessary steps to make applications like GParted to launch 
seanlessly as root, like in Ubuntu?

Thank you,
Cleverson