|
Hello Henry First of all, thanks for your previous message regarding fluxbox suggestion. I'm basically a new user to linux, and i haven't work with configuring system files and installing/uninstalling desktop GUIs. I don't know what a DM even is. so when i look at your mail and also StormDragon's mail, my brain just enters the, "not responding", mode. What i also am looking for was the same thing that alex said. A lightweight system with a web browser, mail client, text editor, music player and system rescue tools. There are already lots of distros like this, but i believe nun of them are accessible. Last weak my main computer which had windows 7 on it crashed. I had no sighted friends for two days, so i wished that i had a rescue disk to see what's going on with my computer. Well, I tried to run sonar,, but it just didn't talk, because it has some serious problems with lots of sound cards apparently (i hope they get fixed soon). So The system that you have suggested requires you to configure your computer, and I don't think it could be made to run as a live system, (can it be?) On 8/17/2014 6:55 AM, B. Henry wrote:
I do not get what you want. For rescue disk, what is there not to like about grml? What is viinuxishness? No, you can't have something that will work on almost all hardware with out puttiing in some extra that i9s bloat compared with a distro that you customize from the very baic stuff on up, and that will require work that the computer novice is not prepared to do, not that they could not do that work with a bit of time and concentration if they want to learn, but I'm just not sure what you are asking for. The really light stuff doesn't do things that most users want, doesn't even have speakup in some cases as far as I remember. You can't get much lighter with a high level of functionality than what I'm preposing with my accessible fluxbox concept. There's a fluxbox distro as well, but it'd need work to make it accessible, and I think that's in the works, or a similar fluxbox based project is anyway. The beauty of the Debian based distros is how much just works on most hardware. Manjaro attempts to do this with an arch base with some success. My arch does everything that most users need with a couple or three exceptions from the CLI, and would work on many systems, but video drivers would be different for many for starters. Do you want skype to work? Lots of questions like that would have to go in to final planning, but this is getting pretty OT for this list, so I'll at mosut reply to a very specific question that ties orca back in. Otherwise, this is for the more general accessibility lists and or Linux lists and groups. GRML with Fluxbox or ratpoison and orca may be what you are after, but I'm not clear as said above, as to exactly your goal(s) and or complaints with what exists other than you want ultra light. Again, to sum up, to be as light as possible you need to be customized as much as possible, to be as plug and play as possible you need some "bloat". Regards, -- B.H. On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 08:17:08PM -0400, Alex H. wrote:Yeah, but can someone just make a sort of bigger version of DSL that has CLI and GUI and doesn't suffer from bloat and ... vinuxyishness? 500megs or less, orca, whatever the litest GUI thing that works w/Orca, no neckbearding needed? Thinking of a small rescue disk that's primarily CLI and not GRML. On 8/16/14, B. Henry <burt1iband gmail com> wrote:It is not that hard to make a custom installer once you have configured things as you like, e.g. installed fluxbox and its dependencies. You can switch from one desktop to another assuming sonar has an accessible DM, and it'd be pretty easy to set up as to get the nicest accessible fluxbox I know of several mate packages and their deps are installed. I use caja to get me a orca readable desktop for instance, and caja is mate's default file manager. I use pcmanfm as my file manager because of its superior performance, better than windows xp's filemanager, windows explorer I think it's called. That is lxde's default file manager, but you want the version from git, pcmanfm-git I'm pretty sure it is called on arch/manjaro. I know it is a bit scarey for some people to think about the configuration required to get all of this working well, but it is actually pretty easy, and I can give you very specific instructions if you want to go this route. Hopefully with in a few months I'll have a screenreader friendly fluxbox setup in the Arch-Linux AUR, so with something like packer or yaourt you will be able to install everything with a single pacman-like command, i.e. pacman -Syu and then packer -S what-ever-I-call-the-package No help today, but something to look forward to. Storm already hs ratpoison accessibility stuff packaged, so you only need to add the accessibility variable export stuff and run a couple of commands to get things screenreader friendly, see his email in this thread regarding this. Unless you are very memory tight Mate should be plently light, and it is enough more accessible compared with lxde to make it a much better choice if you can run it. XFCE is about as accessible as lxde, maybe a bit better actually, (not tried lxde recently to say for sure), and on most systems uses less memory than mate, but as far as cpu goes there's no big advantage either way. At least one person, maybe a significant minority of users, report using less ram with mate than they do with XFCE. All I read however, and personal experience tell me that xfce's lighter on memory usage than Mate. As they often say, "your mileage maly vary,"... -- B.H. On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 11:28:35PM +0430, Hadi Rezaee wrote:I wish there was a distro, (based on manjaro) that had a very lighweight desktop manager. Extremeley lightweight with minimum packages, so i could boot it from my USB flash and take it with me around. Sonar apparently is working on a mate-based distro, But i know many lighter desktops also exists. On 8/16/2014 10:47 PM, B. Henry wrote:Thanks for sharing the link. More later, but quickly, although the menu's not accessible in fluxbox, there is no menu at all for rat-poison. In either one though, as mentioned in my prev post in this thread, you can make a shortcut to open a filemanager in /usr/share/applications/ and pressing enter on the .desktop files in there will launch the programs they refference in their exec lines. Usually the program has same name as the .desktop file, but not always. I have used this technique in flluxbox with the super, (windowskey to some), plus a as the shortcut. The line in my ~/.fluxbox/keys file reading: Mod4 a :Exec pcmanfm /usr/share/applications/ Note that Mod4 is what the windows or super key is called by many *nix configuration files, and Mod1 is alt. Ratpoison has a keybinding to show you all the hotkeys that are configured, so in a sense this is a app menu substitute. The big drawback to ratpoison for me is the two key combination keybindings. As Storm says, it's like screen, or emacs if you wish, i.e. control-t plus something instead of having Control-m do something. I find it rather inconvenient and just plain rhythm destroying to have to press two key combinations to launch programs, show the desktop or what ever instead of just typi9ing one combiinationm, e.g. alt super m to launch mangler, alt super w to launch my default x-www-browser, etc. For others this would not be a bother, or not much of one. Both window managers are very fast, small, and thrifty with system resources in general. Ratpoison's even smaller/lighter than fluxbox, but not noticeablly faster here. They both have atractive features and are quite stable. I do find fluxbox more flexible, and generally more feature rich, but there's plenty good to say about ratpoison. Again, more later. Oh, you can make a .sh file in /etc/profile.d/ and put the GTK_MODULES line in it, andf same with the QT setting, but in a file called qt-accessibility.sh. Having those files should mean that any user will have the access stuff for these kits working, and if you use a dm that doesn't use .xinitrc file in your home dir you -- B.H. On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 11:55:16AM -0400, Storm Dragon wrote:Hi, this is still very much a work in progress. It's designed to replace the inaccessible bits of ratpoison, which is about as fast as you can get and still have access to X. git clone https://github.com/stormdragon2976/strychnine.git You'll have to point to the items in the git directiory in your .ratpoisonrc or add them to fluxbox. If you absolutely have to have a desktop, you can install caja and add caja -n to the .ratpoisonrc. Ratpoison works a lot like screen, I find it very easy to use. Fluxbox was pretty cool too, but the menu isn't accessible, which is a bit of a drawback. In ratpoison, if you need a tray for apps that only work if there's a panel or tray present, try trayer. I only have one app that requires it, and it's a QT app, so I'm not sure how accessible it is. It does say panel when focus lands on it though, so maybe... If you're setting up mate, fluxbox, or ratpoison, here's a quick reference of things you will want to do to make the best accessible experience. Note these instructions work on Arch Linux. I'm not sure where .xinitrc is on other distros like Ubuntu or Vinux. In ~/.xinitrc, make sure you have the line: export GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge In your ~/.bashrc: export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1 In terminal type: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled true And finally, if you chose Mate: gsettings set org.mate.interface accessibility true HTH Storm On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 10:23:57AM -0500, Burt Henry wrote:no panels, can't remember about desktop icons. Mate is a lot heavier than lxde, but light compared with unity or kde, and much cpu less intensive than gnome3 and very accessible with a few glitches. XFCE may be a bit better than lxde, but very similar, and if you can do with out accessible panels and can do with out an organized apps menu you can go super lightweight with fluxbox. In fluxbox assign keuyboard shortcuts to the programs you use most, launch caja to get desktop icons, (use the -n option when auto starting it in the fluxbox start-up file), and assign a key to open the applications dir in /usr/share to get a way to launch any app you don't have a shortcut for and do not remember exact name for. Also Stormdragon wrote a little script to replace the run box app that's not accessible for fluxbox, ratpoison and similar. I don't have his original, but do have my slightly hacked version of this I can send, or look in archives for the url to get his version. Build from source if not able to get latest fluxbox on your debian based distro, it's in repos for arch. I can help more with the fluxbox configuration if you are interested, and maybe it'll get better out of the box with in a reasonable time frame, some dev interest. OAll of the above mentioned options require exporting gtk modules and setting qt accessiblity at least as well as a couple things for gconf for mate anyway, same gets stuff working for fluxbox. I can send you some links and or notes later if you need. -- B.H. There are a couple more hacks for fluxbox. On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 08:06:43AM -0700, austinAustin quesada wrote:Hi list. Was just wondering if the light-weight LXDE environment is accessible using orca? I have some older machines laying around that might benefit from a debian or arch install with LXDE. If it's not particularly accessible, could anyone advise on another light-weight desktop? Thanks for any feedback. _______________________________________________ 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_______________________________________________ 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-- Powered by Arch Linux! I am registered Linux user number 508465: https://linuxcounter.net/user/508465.html My blog, Thoughts of a Dragon: http://www.stormdragon.tk/ get my public PGP key: gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 43DDC193 Follow me on Pump.io: http://microca.st/stormdragon2976 "It's not our aim to hum, to aspirate, to perish tardily. It's our goal to be, and to become, and to rise constantly." Van Canto - Quest for Roar_______________________________________________ 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_______________________________________________ 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_______________________________________________ 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_______________________________________________ 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 |