Re: [orca-list] Is Manjaro ready to use?

[Bill Cox <waywardgeek gmail com>]

I have installed the latest Manjaro, and am "joining" the team, to at 
least some extent, to help make it accessible.  I had difficulty 
installing as well, even though I can see the screen fine, mostly 
because it had trouble with my SSD drive.  Once I tried the text-based 
"testing" installer, everything went fine.

I think Manjaro is "ready" for blind developers who are comfortable with 
the bash shell command line.  I would recommend that blind users who are 
not very Linux savvy should use a stable release of Vinux/Ubuntu rather 
than Sonar/Manjaro, since Vinux stable releases are based on highly 
accessible and reliable Ubuntu LTE releases.  Also, vision-impaired 
developers with advanced knowledge of the Debian package management 
system should consider working with Luke in Vinux to help make an 
outstanding Vinux based on the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTE release.

I consider Sonar based on Manjaro to be a place where vision impaired 
programmers who are not necessarily Debian packaging experts can work 
together to develop new applications and make existing ones more 
accessible.  Ubuntu PPAs are an excellent improvement in collaboration, 
but it's hard to beat Arch's AUR and Arch's ease of patching packages in 
the AUR and Manjaro repositories.  I think a priority for Sonar should 
be feeding accessibility improvements both upstream and over to Vinux 
rapidly.

There are other reasons for Sonar to be based on Manjaro.  Most 
importantly, one of the primary developers of Manjaro, Philip Muller, is 
personally helping to both make Manjaro accessible, and to help maintain 
Sonar packages on top of Manjaro.  I cannot stress enough how important 
relationships like this are.  Luke's support for Vinux and Ubuntu 
accessibility is the #1 reason I have advocated for Vinux to be based on 
Ubuntu.  If you can't get mindshare from the upstream distro devs, 
you're simply not going to have much impact.  Hopefully, we'll be able 
to come up with some good stuff for Luke while hacking Sonar, and 
hopefully in time for Vinux based on Ubuntu 14.04.  If you're interested 
in general Linux accessibility hacking, consider joining the Sonar team 
to develop a great distro on top of Manjaro.  I hope to contribute to 
both Sonar and Vinux.

As an example of how awesome it is to hack in Sonar, I was able to port 
a beta-quality version of speech-hub to Sonar in a few days. I also have 
it running in Ubuntu 13.04, but speech-hub requires Java, which normally 
doesn't ship with Debian distros installed by default, and I'm not ready 
to build a Debian package for speech-hub until speech-hub is more 
stable.  Since speech-hub needs Java and a manual patch to Orca, Sonar 
added it.  Now testers can try speech-hub, with all it's current flaws 
and potential, by just installing Sonar.  Once speech-hub is solid and 
has proven to be useful, I hope to get it into Vinux, Ubuntu, and 
Debian, and to get the one-line Orca patch into Orca, along with the 
speech-hub's python speech factory.

Bill

On 10/25/2013 8:23 AM, Kyle wrote:
> The short answer: Manjaro is *almost* ready. If you don't mind using a
> text-based installer that runs in a terminal, it will most likely work
> without too many issues. The main hold-up at the moment is the graphical
> installer. It hasn't yet made it to the stable repository, and it still
> kills the important parts of Orca when the installation hits 100%,
> forcing a restart of Orca to get anything other than keyboard echo
> working again. It is also spiking the CPU during the install process
> while Orca is running. Once these issues are resolved and the graphical
> installer hits the stable repo, it will be ready for use. There will be
> a Sonar release based on Manjaro shortly after Manjaro itself is ready
> for easy deployment with Orca. The only other hangup there is the need
> for some code synchronization between the ManjaroISO and SonarISO build
> systems, which is expected very shortly. I hope this clarifies things a bit.
> ~Kyle
> http://kyle.tk/