Latest Chapter in the Quest for Orca

[Martin G. McCormick]

	I downloaded bothe the netinst cd as well as CD1 and
here is what happened:

	There is something wrong with the netinstall CD. It
talks just fine but one must plug the keyboard in to the mouse
port to controll the installation process. When you are
finished, that port dies as a keyboard input and you must move
to the regular keyboard port.

	I did about 3 installs using that disk and never once
got orca to do what it is supposed to do. Once, I got the login
prompt in orca and nothing after the login. 

	I then tried the suggestion of a fellow list member and
downloaded the first full CD and did an install from that.

	On that CD, the keyboard port starts out properly and
does not change which is what should happen.

	I did an install from that and now have no orca login
prompt but I can silently log in and I get the "Welcome to orca"
message but nothing after that.

	When I ssh in from a working command-line console, I can
see myself on tty7 or it shows as unknown before logging in.

	A tail of syslog while logging in is a tale of woe. The
very first thing that happens on entering the password is a kill
signal 15 to the gnome session and then a cascade of error
messages about child processes already being dead, etc. It's
over before it even starts.

	All I did for all these installations was boot the CD
with the s parameter so speakup comes on and then answer all the
installation questions as one would if they wanted the basic
system, gnome and all the utilities. It is 1, 8 and 10 and that
is all.

	I don't think this system is sick because speakup runs
fine if gdm3 is off and espeakup is capable of running as it
produces either the login window or "Welcome to orca" depending
on which broken installation I am pounding on right now.

	I truly don't know what else to do. The gnome login
doesn't survive past the successful entry of the password so
something is terribly wrong from the installation itself and it
doesn't seem to matter whether it is all done over the network
or via the #1 disk.

	Is there a boot string that launches orca without
speakup? I don't really want to not have speakup, but I am
willing to try anything else at this point as I think the speech
engines both work and I can get in to a command console via ssh
from another system if I need to.

	Many thanks and I can supply logs of all the errors if
anybody needs to see them.

Martin