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

Well, Manjaro should stay fairly up to date with Orca, so that's positive. On the other hand, all sorts of packages keeps changing all the time, which can be a problem. There are three versions of Manjaro: stable, testing, and unstable. The "unstable" version is nearly identical to Arch. The testing repo is updated a few days after that, and the stable maybe a week or so after that. If you run the unstable or testing version, and run into a problem, you can switch to stable and report the accessibility bug hopefully in time to avoid having that bug propagate to stable. After the bug's fixed, you can switch back to testing or unstable. It's kind of cool that you can switch between them without reinstalling. It's one of the things that I think will be useful for blind developers, but it goes for blind testers as well. Again, I wouldn't recommend it yet for blind people who just need a computer for standard stuff like email, web browsing, and document editing. The people saying Manjaro isn't ready for prime time have valid concerns. Manjaro hopes to become stable like Vinux LTE releases, but realistically, solid releases like that take a ton of work by a ton of people. Arch land is for people who live dangerously. 

Bill

On 10/25/2013 10:53 AM, luciano de souza wrote:

Actually, I Like Ubuntu. The problem is that I want to have Orca
updated. But Orca belongs to Gnome and to update Gnome is necessáry to
reinstall the system. What I really want to avoid is to reinstall the
system.

I came from Windows world. When I new version of the screen reader is
launched, it's enough to run a setup. Unfortunately, it's not easy to
update Orca becose of the necessity to reinstall all the system. The
time spent, the risk of problems, the backups... Yes, I know that this
process does not need to be so hard. But when you don't feel safe, all
preventions are adopted.

In other words, the single reason why I have been thinking about Arch
Linux is the capacity to update itself without preocupying
reinstalations.


2013/10/25, 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/

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