Re: [orca-list] Getting to the boot menu to install Linux

[Jeffery Mewtamer <mewtamer gmail com>]

On my current desktop, to boot a live or installation CD/DVD, I
justpop the disc in the drive, reboot, and if all goes well, the disc
boots without me having to do anything extra. That said, a sudo reboot
will sometimes ignore that there's abootable disc in the optical drive
and a sudo halt sometimes requires physically powering down the
machine or pulling the plug before doing a cold boot. I also think my
power button might be wearing out(I seem to need to hold it longer for
power off/on everytime I need to use it) and have taken to using my
cell phone and whether it's getting charge from a USB port as a power
indicator as I can't hear the system fans or drive spin over the room
fan I have sitting on top of my tower.

Never managed to boot from USB on this thing, and I don't know if it's
due to USB boot not being supported, none of the USB thumbdrives I've
tried being bootable, not caring where USB was in the boot order when
I first got this machine(about a year before going blind), or if the
BIOS ignored my wishes and demoted USB below the harddrive without me
noticing... That said, the desired behavior if I were to switch  to
using USB thumbdrives for Live and installation media would be to plug
the thumbdrive in and if there's no other bootable, removable media,
the thumbdrive would boot automatically at the next system boot and
for this behavior to be persistent.

Did have luck booting from a USB optical drive on a laptop that didn't
have a built-in optical drive(it was incredibly frustrating that I
couldn't get a laptop with an on-board optical drive), and it was
annoying enough that the optical drive took longer to power on than
the window the laptop had for detecting bootable media, so to boot
from the optical drive on a cold boot, I had to hammer ctrl+alt+delete
immediately after pressing the power button to give the drive time to
power up, and it had to be as soon as I powered the laptop on because
the window where ctrl+alt+delete worked like a reset button before
more modern power management kicked in was about as short as the
window for detecting boot media...Not sure which I hated more about
that laptop, the lack of a built-in optical drive, the extra hoops to
jump through to boot from an external optical drive, SD cards sticking
out of it's SD slot instead of being flusH(lost at least one card to
the exposed bit getting snapped off or smashed between the laptop and
a hard surface), or the fact the screen refused to stay off(there was
a keyboard shortcut to turn the screen off, but literally any other
keypress would turn it back on and this was at a time when my recently
blinded eye was suffering hypersensitivity to light).

Also, is spiders taking up residence inside a computer tower actually
common? Because I've opened up several towers, both before and after
going blind, and the worst I've ever found inside has been dust
bunnies... and I've found a lot less inside my current desktop than I
did inside the family PC that was used for most of the 00s... Granted,
that one was kept in the common areas of a home with multiple smokers
and a major mold problem... I still live with smokers, but this
desktop has always been kept in a smoke-free room and has never been
in a mold infested environment to my knowledge. Still, at roughly a
decade old(it was given to me by my state's division of services for
the blind about a month into the fall 2011 semester), I fear the day
it eventually breaks down(fortunately, the primary data drive is less
than a year old and the secondary data drive is only about 5 years
old, so hopefully my data will outlast the machine.