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Re: [orca-list] First time trying linux

That is certainly surprising. Of course I never head the impression
that it would be specific to vinux. I honestly did not make much of
it, since I had seen others describe a similar situation.

On 1/14/12, Christopher Chaltain <chaltain gmail com> wrote:

I spend quite a bit of time on Vinux 3.1 and 3.2.1, and I haven't
experienced this GUI instability you're talking about, so it's not
intrinsic to Vinux. I hope you reported this to the vinux team to see if
they could help figure out what's going on in your situation.

On 14/01/12 16:03, Justin Harford wrote:

This discussion reminds me of the first time I tried linux. Ubuntu was
around version 6… it was back around 2007. I downloaded it and booted up
on a vmware machine. I had to follow the instructions to navigate through
the first part without speech. I pressed alt f2… typed orca, and was
immediately presented with that command line that I had met in Mac OS X,
and somewhat feared. The next several days I spent sorting through online
documentation, trying to install speech dispatcher to make orca more
stable, and trying to get a bleeding edge version of firefox to replace
the one that came with the distribution, so that I could access the
internet.

Yeah I have to admit having it come up speaking from the get go makes
things easier if you are a newby (though vinux did not do this for me on
my acer), but I have to admit, this introduction through vinux really has
left me wanting more. The almost absolute instability of the GUI, which
constantly gets hung up, has sent me running for the console, and looking
up command line tools to replace the Gnome Panel.

It's a good motivator… not necessarily a matter of sink or swim anymore,
but a matter of either swim, or accept a low functioning system.

Regards
Justin Harford
On 14-01-2012, at 1:08, kendell clark wrote:


you should write a review of vinux. That was the best review of vinux
i've ever seen, lol. I second that recommendation re vinux. I didn't know
about the qt at-spi stuff but i got equally frustrated with orca in
unity. Weird issues that are hard to reproduce unless you count lots of
unity segfaults, rhythmbox completely crashes and burns, and  some weird
bugs in unity itself. Vinux 3.2.1 is the way to go, unless you want the
last lts, then it's 3.0.1 currently, but there's a 3.0.2 which is
supposed to provide newer orca, kernel and newer packages.  It's still in
beta afaik.
thanks
Kendell clark
On 01/13/2012 09:49 PM, Alex Midence wrote:

I wouldn't recommend Ubuntu 11.10 to someone who hasn't used Linux with
Orca before.  There are way way way too many accessibility holes in
Unity right now.  Vinux 3.2 is based on Ubuntu 11.04 and it works just
fine.  You still get relatively recent packages and you have all your
accessibility stuff pre-configured for you.  Best of all:  it's not on
Unity.  This means that the community of users who could help him out
with any problems he may run into is larger since it's using gnome 2.32
which we all know well.  He didn't ask for a distro that was on the
bleeding edge.  He said he's new to Linux and wants one he can go with
to try it out for the first time.  Oneiric is too full of a11y holes and
has a totally new approach, Debian requires too much knowledge and would
only frustrate him with its advanced requirements and possible hardware
hurdles, Fedora is a pain to install, Arch is absolutely too advanced,
don't know anything about Suse so, I won't comment on them but,

honestly, I can't think of a better distro for someone to try Linux out with
all the accessibility bells and whistles than Vinux.  All the work is done
for you and the user community actually prides itself on its friendliness
towards rank newbies.  I speak from experience.  I started using Vinux in
August of 2010 and kept it as my primary distro until about a month and a
half ago when I more or less switched over to Debian because I'm doing more
server-type stuff now and all the technical publications I'm going through
use it to teach their concepts. Anyway, you couldn't ask for a more helpful,
patient and friendly bunch of folks than that group and installing Vinux
without sighted assistance is seriously easy as it trying out a live CD.
There's even a pre-built virtual machine he could try out so he can stay in
windows while trying Linux to see if he likes it and wants to pursue it.
Oh, and say what you Will about Vinux not keeping up with bleeding edge
mainstream software
 like Gnome3 or stuff like that but, work is currently underway to get
Debian packages created for qt-at-spi's recent full release, the latest
ports of at-spi2 and the latest builds of Orca.  People won't have to
install them from source if they want them and they will have the most
recent versions. I don't know another distro that can boast that, certainly
not Ubuntu propper. They're waitinf for their April long term release for
all that stuff.  Ther's also talk about a multidesktop testers version of
Vinux with pre-installed Unity, Gnome3, KDE, and XFCE so people can try them
out now that lots of a11y support is coming along.  By the way, if anyone
wants to help out with that effort with testing and, especially with
development of that edition, you'll find an appreciative reception.


Regards,
Alex M

On Fri, 13 Jan 2012, Thomas Ward wrote:


Hi Andy,

Well, it is true that Vinux is running behind the other distributions
when it comes to the latest and greatest versions of packages, but I
also know its both stable and new users probably aren't concerned with
bleeding edge yet. I feel getting a stable and very accessible version
of Linux on a new users system takes presidents over weather they have
the latest version of LibreOffice, Firefox, etc.

For example, just over the last week or so I've seen several messages
on how to switch Ubuntu 11.10 over to the 2d version of Unity so they
can get maximum accessibility out of the Unity desktop.  That might be
fine for someone like myself who has used Ubuntu Linux since version 6
or so, but I don't think a new user should have to learn to setup
Orca, reconfigure the desktop environment, and learn both Orca and
Linux all at once. Vinux is a nice compromise where the accessibility
is already setup and someone can learn Orca and Linux without being
forced to know from day one how to get everything up and running with
accessibility before they learn the OS and screen reader.

To me its a choice of starting someone out at the shallow end of the
pool, teach them to swim, and work there way to the deep end, or just
throw them head long into the deep end of the pool and tell them to
sink or swim. I can say that no one really likes being tossed into the
deep end of the pool and being forced to sink or swim from day one.

HTH


On 1/13/12, Andy B <sonfire11 gmail com> wrote:

Vinux is so far behind though... And I'm sure many new users have
found help
getting orca started in Ubuntu 11.10.


_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp


_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp



--
Christopher (CJ)
chaltain gmail com
_______________________________________________
orca-list mailing list
orca-list gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca.
The manual is at
http://library.gnome.org/users/gnome-access-guide/nightly/ats-2.html
The FAQ is at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/FrequentlyAskedQuestions
Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
Find out how to help at http://live.gnome.org/Orca/HowCanIHelp
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