Why I can't recommend Arch or Gentoo

[Tony Baechler]

I never got as far as looking at the Arch installation because of the two 
major problems, one being the lack of sound and the other being with brltty 
locking up my DECtalk Express.  However, the more I think about it, the more 
I think the problems are not with Talking Arch specifically, but with Arch 
upstream.  Not being an Arch user and no longer being interested, I'm not 
going to do anything about it, but someone should probably file bugs on 
this.  Whether we like it or not, sometimes we need to make mods to talking 
media in order to get around strange accessibility issues.  I think this is 
one of those cases, at least with brltty in particular, but that's not my 
decision to make.

With my own live CD, it's entirely Debian packages with a few very minor 
scripts and a startup sound.  While it can be installed to the hard drive 
with a single command (bootcd2disk), that isn't its intended purpose, 
although it is an option for people who want a working Debian system which 
comes up talking with no hassle.

Out of curiosity, what is your sound card?  It might be a matter of the 
firmware being non-free, in which case most distros aren't going to work 
unless they provide non-free firmware.  If it works on another distro, it's 
probably an Arch problem.  Also, it might be muted by default, in which case 
Talking Arch (and all distros) should include unmute scripts.

On 9/22/2015 4:11 PM, Glenn wrote:
> I too wanted the talking Arch, and when it did not come up talking, I
> considered that it did not like my sound card.
> I'm using an Acer laptop.
> I also considered trying it on another computer, but when I read all there
> was to installing it, I lost interest.
> I have installed Linux with the GUI interface many times, sometimes with
> accessibility problems, but that aside, it went well and was easy.
> I think a GUI interface on the disk would be nice for even installing the
> CLI interface.
> Glenn