Re: [orca-list] Latest orca that can be installed on Ubuntu 16.04

[John G Heim <jheim math wisc edu>]

I think your problem is probably that the sound card is muted or that 
it's volume is set to zero. But the key to debugging the problem when 
you get no speech at startup depends on somehow getting logged in so you 
can try different things. If you are installing debian, you can tell it 
to install an ssh server and connect remotely. If you are installing a 
distro with a really recent kernel, like ubuntu artful, and you have a 
hardware synth, you can use a character console. If you don't have a 
hardware synth, you might be able to go to a character console, log in 
as root, and install espeakup which used to give you software speech 
upon a successful install. I think that is distro dependent these days 
and won't help anyway if the problem is with your sound card.

If those options aren't available, if you can somehow get logged in at 
the GUI, you can press alt+control+t to run the default terminal 
emulator. You can then use your smart phone and an app like KNFBReader 
to read the screen and then install ssh or test the sound card. A good 
way to test if you are indeed at a command prompt is to type eject. That 
should cause your cd-rom drawer to open (if you have one). Another thing 
to try is beep.  Testing with the beep command is not definitive these days.

Once you somehow get an accessible command line prompt, you can check if 
sound is working. Some things to try once you get a command prompt:

1. Check that the user you created during the install has permissions to 
access the sound card. On debian based distros the user has to be a 
member of the audio group. If you're logged in as root, you can just add 
the user to the audio group. If the user is already a member it will say 
so. "adduser john audio".

2. Check if alsa recognizes your sound card, "aplay -l".

3. Try playing some sound files, "find /usr -name '*.wav' -exec aplay {} \;"

4. Try unmuting and setting the volume of the sound card:

amixer set Master unmute
amixer set Master volume 80%

I'll bet that last step solves your problem. Two other things you can 
try are to re-initialize alsa settings and reconfigure 
speech-dispatcher. To reset alsa settings:

1. Delete the alsa settings file. "rm /var/lib/alsa/asound.state".
2. Run the alsa init command, "alsactl init"

To reconfigure your own speech-dispatcher settings, simply run 
"spd-conf".  I don't know how to reset speech-dispatcher settings for 
the login screen. That has never been the problem in my experience. And 
it's been a hunderded yars (almost) since I've seen alsa not recognize 
my sound card. I'll bet the problem is that your sound card is muted 
and/or the volume is zero.


On 02/18/2018 11:04 PM, kendell clark wrote:
> hi
>
> I'm no orca expert, but I don't believe you can use 3.26. Maybe 3.20 or 
> 3.22, but the version that is installed on xenial, which is 16.04 is 
> 3.18. If you try to build orca from git the bits that orca depends on, 
> at-spi, gtk, etc are too old and orca will fail to build. Unless there's 
> a PPA out there that has the newer bits, and there might be, I think 
> you're limited. I'd recommend a more up to date distro for running 
> latest software, like antergos. But antergos definitely has something 
> wrong. Despite everyone on this list assuring me their installs work 
> fine, I managed to drag an old laptop out of the closet and installed 
> antergos on it. Same issue I've reported hear. No speech after an 
> install. I want to help get this fixed instead of complaining about it. 
> How should I go about debugging this? I've already reported to antergos 
> on twitter.
>
> Thanks
>
> Kendell Clark
>
>
>
> On 02/18/2018 10:44 PM, Guy Schlosser wrote:
> > Hi all, just curious. I just got Ubuntu mate 16.04 with mate 1.18 up 
> > and running? What is the latest orca I can install on this 
> > configuration? Can I go to 3.26? Just checking, and thanks for any input.
> >
> > Sent from my iPhone
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
> > Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
> > GNOME Universal Access guide: 
> > https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html
> > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org