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

Ok, if you're trying to talk people out of going to it unless they code or test, it ain't workin' for me!  It 
sounds exciting, neat and full of adventure!  Just exactly what I like in a Linux distribution.  I like to 
tinker and tweak and mess around with stuff and the idea of the constant change and the "living dangerously" 
goes straight to the heart, it does.  I think I'll go out tonight, grab myself a six pack of Granger's IPA or 
Black Bute Porter and have a crack at it this weekend while working my way through some of the beer.  My 
geeky version of fun, sorry.  :)

Alex M


-----Original Message-----
From: orca-list [mailto:orca-list-bounces gnome org] On Behalf Of Bill Cox
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2013 11:44 AM
To: luciano de souza
Cc: orca-list gnome org
Subject: 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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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
https://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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