[orca-list] OpenSUSE 13.1 is officially out!

["D. A. H." <dhunt freedommail co>]

The announcement came in while I was sleeping early this morning.  In 
the GNOME "preview", they basically paste the contents of the official 
GNOME 3.10 release announcement; here's the link.

http://news.opensuse.org/2013/10/29/sneak-peek-opensuse-13-1-what-we-have-for-gnome-users/

For your convenience, I include a direct link to the ftp folder, 
containing the live distribution dvd images, since the official download 
page can be difficult to navigate with orca and the Mozilla browser.

Make sure you grab one of the opensuse-gnome-live*  files from this 
directory; checksums are also here.

http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/13.1/iso/

I tried the latest release candidate, and found that live media startup 
and use were a good experience.  I got installation right, the first 
time, and had the system running from my hard drive within 30 minutes of 
starting the installer.  On starting from the drive, I soon found 
periods of garbled speech, and that I could not easily control the 
applications' volumes.  EG, I'd set what I thought to be the master 
volume to a comfortable level for orca, to find that pidgin's 
notification sounds blasted; my ears still ringing;  lol.  The 
configuration tool, YaST2, (this really distinguishes Suse from other 
distros), still has its accessibility issues, that is, when launching a 
YaST module from control center, there is no speech; one can get around 
this by manually starting a module from the terminal or 'run' dialogue. 
 Finally, however OpenSUSE set up their XFCE session, I cannot get it 
talking, even with the 'GTK_MODULES variable set to 'gail:atk-bridge'; 
this works in other distros.


Cheers,