[orca-list] updates on Linux adventures

[Devin Prater <r d t prater gmail com>]

Hi all. Last night, I got Brltty working within talking arch. I played around with it and learned to use it, 
mo'£y. Now that I have my toe in the door, I'd like to learn the GUI desktops. My Debean installation runs 
the Debean desktop environment. My main problem right now is that most of the installers I've tried start 
with volume muted, but with GUI, we don't have alsamixer, at least not a command away. I tried Fedora, both 
23 and 24 beta, and tried all function keys, as I heard media keys can be used to raise the volume, but 
nothing so far. I tried looking up, using differing terms, volume shortcut keys, hotkeys, all that. I'm just 
about Googled out, so I need some help. Is there a nonvisual way to activate the volume menu in the Fedora 
installer? I've also downloaded Trisquel, but with only free software, I'm not so sure it'd be all that good. 
Besides that, it was last revised, at least in release, a good 2 years ago, so I think Fedora will be the 
distro of choice, if only I can get it installed.