Re: Getting Started
Christopher Toth <q.alpha@gmail.com> wrote:
> I hit alt+f7 again to return to the gdm login window. I selected my
> user and was greeted with a password field. "Quite reasonable," I
> thought, while typing my password. "This Linux accessibility thing
> has gotten a lot better!"
Access to Gdm with Orca was a last-minute addition to the Debian Wheezy
release. If this has any relation to your issues then that's only because it
was squeezed in near the end of the release process. Also remember that under
Wheezy you're running Gnome 3.4 (hence Orca 3.4), whereas 3.8 is the current
version of both. Many bugs have been fixed upstream since 3.4.
> I pressed Return, waited a few seconds, and was greeted with the
> "Welcome to Orca message"
> Then...
> ...Nothing
> I waited.
> Still nothing
> I waited some more. About 5 minutes since initial login. Still no speech.
> Hm. Okay, this is why I'm on a VM! So I popped out of the VM, fired
> up ssh and logged in to my new machine to see if I could see what
> the heck was going on.
> But wait! I have no idea where orca sticks logs, if it even uses
> syslog, or anything! What can I do?
~/.xsession-errors is a good place to look. Orca can provide logs if you run
it with orca --debug --replace for example.
> Well, I thought, perhaps Orca has somehow scuffed itself up and all
> I need do is restart it. So I issued killall orca from the shell. I
> reactivated my VM, hit alt+f2, typed orca, and wonder of wonders it
> came up for real this time!
> This ... is a problem. A huge, ugly disgusting problem that I hope
> can be rectified very hastily.
> I'm a Gnu/Linux user for more than a decade and more than ready to
> get in and monkey with stuff. But there is absolutely no excuse for
> having the first-run experience of a new user include switching
> shells, followed by killing their screen reader, followed by
> switching back and restarting it. This is absurd and untenable.
> You literally cannot have a more standard installation experience. I
> did nothing outside the norm, instead accepting all the defaults.
> I am somewhat frustrated. To me, myself a software developer, this
> experience points strongly at a culture which does not test or
> otherwise provide quality assurance for the code they produce.
> Surely a few people at least tried to do bare-metal installs on
> virtual machines at least for testing purposes? Let alone any actual
> unit/integration tests.
Are you offering to do those? Work gets done if somebody volunteers and
actually contributes the work; bugs get reported if somebody discovers issues
and submits bug reports, etc. Whatever problem you are experiencing simply did
not arise or was not reported prior to the release.
I've been monitoring the list, and quite a few bugs were found and corrected
during the release process. It's all working for me, of course, and for others
on the list. The main difference that comes to mind is that I'm not using Gdm.
My recommendation: when Debian upgrades to Gnome 3.8 in the Testing
distribution, and provided the Debian Orca package works at that point as it
should, upgrade away from Gnome 3.4 and Orca 3.4. Meanwhile, if you can track
down the cause of your problem I'm sure a bug report would be welcomed by the
Debian maintainers.
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