Switching to Linux

[Jason White]

Rob Hudson <speakup at linux-speakup.org> wrote:
>My problem with gnome/orca is that it is extreeeemely slow. If there was a 
>way to strip out most of the unnessential stuff in gnome, I'd probably use 
>it more often. I'm talking about almost thirty seconds to launch firefox, as 
>an example. Under XP on the same system, it only takes maybe five to ten 
>seconds. Granted, I haven't used gnome outside of vinux and i haven't really 
>played around much with default gnome as installed from source or package 
>management, so maybe it's just me. Or maybe it's orca that's slow, I just 
>don't know.

Do you mean 30 seconds to start Firefox after the Gnome desktop is already
running? If so, something is wrong in your case, because it's a very quick
start-up process here on both my desktop and laptop, running Debian.

The problem that Speakup solves and Orca does not, as already noted, is that
Speakup works from the console and can load early.

One disadvantage of relying on the kernel, though, is that it could make it
harder to load Speakup in environments where it might be wanted, e.g., Grub 2.
Work to make BRLTTY executable within Grub itself has started, an effort that
couldn't be paralleled with Speakup as it stands.

There's also an interesting question whether it might be possible to have
Speakup loaded into the firmware of a UEFI machine, to make it accessible
prior to the boot loader. Again, you need to be able to build an executable
for that, and there would have to be a module capable of connecting into UEFI
to get the screen output and keyboard input. At this point I don't know
whether such an effort might be possible, but it should be considered in
planning for future development.