the direction of speakup

[John G. Heim]

The explanation for why I've had so little trouble may be that I am pretty much a plain debian user. All my machines have either debian stable or debiantesting. I haven't had much trouble. I haven't tried vinux or ubuntu lately but I never got orca working well when I tried them in the past. When I need a live CD, I use grml and speakup.
But there is no way I'd switch to linux full time if I couldn't use orca. 
On May 8, 2013, at 2:15 PM, Martin G. McCormick wrote:

> 	The problem is not orca other than we need it to use the
> system if we are to use the gnome GUI.
> 
> 	The problem is sort of like those 35-lamp series strings
> of Christmas lights. All the bulbs are in series which means
> that every single last one has to have an intact filament or
> none of the bulbs will light. You've got a dead string and there
> is no way to tell what is wrong without checking every socket to
> see where the circuit breaks.
> 
> 	On that system which, in theory, should scream through
> orca, I have had a sighted person tell me that the desktop shows
> up on the screen. Orca may be talking away in bursts of
> electrons somewhere in the system, but the audio is dead. There
> are no sounds of any kind. A sighted user might not even know
> the sound is dead until he or she does something that should
> produce a sound.
> 
> 	The actual problem in my case appears to be that live
> CD's including the last Vinux distribution I tried appear to get
> the sound part of the setup wrong as I have not heard so much as
> a click from the sound chip on any ubuntu live CD since version
> 9.
> 
> 	What we have is a dead parrot, in the words of "Monty
> Python."
> 
> 	The sound card is not bad. If I install Debian squeeze
> with speakup, it roars right along. Mplayer plays music and the
> hardware is genning right along though pulseaudio is sick.
> 
> 	I do have a SB16 and the next step is to get my
> wonderful and patient wife to help me through the bios setup to
> either kill the on-board sound chip or make it secondary so the
> SB16 can be the primary audio device and then try a new live CD
> to see if we get sound this time.
> 
> 	I suspect that once all the hoops are jumped, orca will
> work fine as the problem occurs before that stage.
> 
> "John G. Heim" writes:
>> Huh, you're the second person in this thread to say that about orca. But I
>> just decided to switch to linux full time a few months ago and it was
>> pretty much a breeze. I had been using that other operating system too but
>> almost all the end users I support use linux (all good mathematicians do).
>> So I felt I was cheating by not using linux. But I have had little to no
>> trouble switching to linux with orca. I use thunderbird & firefox
>> constantly. It's not quite as good as Windows/jaws but honestly, I made 
>> the
>> transition fairly easily.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I am really shocked to hear all these complaints about orca. Not to doubt
>> you. It's just that it doesn't jibe with my experience at all.
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