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Re: [orca-list] First time trying linux

Hi there
You are probably right. I was confusing the people who are using the bleeding edge builds with those who are not. My mistake.
I guess whether vinux, the version with ubuntu 10.04, has problems with the GUI is really based on the criteria of the user.
The only areas where I really have trouble arer in pidgin and in firefox. In pidgin, I find that the program crashes when I try to carry on chat conversations with my msn contacts. I used to have an msn, aim, yahoo and skype account set up on it. Then I experienced more frequent crashes, and thinking that it was because I had registered so many protocals on it, I got rid of the other accounts, and just started using msn. The crashes are less frequent, but it will crash after about 10 or 15 minutes in a single chat conversation.
I think my problems with firefox perhaps have to do with the time thaht it takes to load a webpage, or more specifically, the itme it takes orca to load the necessary buffers, so that it could interact with the page. I would get confused, because it would say that it had finished loading. I took that to mean thath it had finished the webpage and it was ready for me to start browsing, but in reality it is only referring to one component, and if I let it go longer, it will tell me about a number of things thaht it finishes loading, twitter, facebook, google and news services etc. So, I think that if I wait for all that to load before trying to navigate, it should work okay. But, that would mean that I would have to wait a pretty long time, probably about two to five minutes for a single page. Call me picky, but that just seems too long.
So, I'll just say that I would like things to be more snappy than they are, and I find such to be the case when I use the console. For example, if I open pidgin and go up and down my list of contacts, there is a delay of about a second from when I push the arrow key, and when it reads the contact. If I do the same thing in finch with speakup, it is much faster.
But, as I get more experience using my system, I am finding that it is good to have access to both the console and the gdm, as they act as a sort of check-and-balance system. When one crashes, the other is usually working, so I'm never dead in the water. And that is good. 

I hope I was able to clarify my views on this subject. Sorry if I misspoke.

Regards
Justin Harford

On 14/01/12 18:40, Christopher Chaltain wrote:
What do you find so surprising? I'm not the only one running Vinux with basically no problems. In fact, I suspect your experience is more the exception rather than the rule, at least for anyone running Vinux 3.0.1, the latest LTS release of Vinux, the most tested and supported version. I also don't recall a lot of other people having GUI stability issues with Vinux 3.0.1. People have had problems with audio, especially on the developmental and experimental versions of Vinux. 

On 14/01/12 17:59, Justin Harford wrote:

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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