On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 06:48:34PM +0300, Veli-Pekka Tatila wrote:
> Kenny Hitt wrote:
> >Gnome 2.6 is the version in unstable. I
> >believe it is also now the version in testing also.
> Thanks for the info. I'm curious to know what's new in terms of
> accessibility in 2.6 in contrast to 2.4. The last time I checked the Gnome
> home page, it just said that they'll be writing about the improvements in
> the accessibility side pretty soon. I think I'll install the whole of Gnome
> like I just installed KDE a while back. I'm now running apt-get
> dist-upgrade in the background with the distro set to testing and there are
> quite many KDE packages to be upgraded. Fortunately I've got a VDSL
> connection and the funet.fi FTP-mirror is real fast, too.
>
Most of the improvements in Gnome 2.6 are bug fixes. Flat review mode
was broken in Gnome 2.4, but it's now fixed in Gnome 2.6. Gdm now beeps
when it's ready for a user to log into the system.Btw, if you want your
system to boot to a graphical login, make sure the gdm package is
installed. If
apt-get install gnome
doesn't get it, just apt-get install gdm to make sure it's installed.
> Yet another newbie question (YANR):
> OK, I'm under the impression that stable contains the files in the current
> Debian release, testing is some kind of a middle-ground and unstable
> contains the latest bits of software being worked upon. Now, when Serge is
> out does it mean that files in testing will contain newer software that
> will be part of the next distro after Serge and that stable will be
> synonymous with Serge files?
>
Yes, testing and Sarge are the same. When Sarge becomes stable, I
believe a snapshot of unstable becomes the new testing. If you want to
stick with Sarge, I think putting sarge instead of testing in your
sources.list file would keep your system running Sarge. That's how I
did it to make my laptop stop upgrading with Woody. It started out
running Potato, but got upgraded to Woody when it was still testing.
> >Btw, I'm totally blind, so I can't use Mozilla or Evolution.
> Umm, can't you use Gnopernicus to read them? I managed to install
> Gnopernicus in Mandrake and it read most bundled Gnome apps all right.
> However, none of the Mandrake specific configuration tools were read at
> all, which finally put me off regarding using X with speech. Also, I like
> KDE better because of the graphical theme editor and many other things, but
> no can do. QT won't be accessible any time soon, I suppose.
>
Most of Gnome is accessible with Gnopernicus, but Mozilla Evolution, and
Gnome's help system still aren't.
> I think it should work with both. I have a little sight left but am mostly
> working with speech. And would really need speech in the long run,
> magnified images are moree like the secondary and complementary output
> medium to me if speech is primary.
>
You might try the magnifier of Gnopernicus. Some of my problems with
using speech only might be solved with magnification. The big problem with
Gnopernicus is it isn't very stable. You can restart it a few times
before you cause the Gnome session to fail. At that point, you have to
kill the X server and log in again. Control-alt-backspace works to kill
the server, so it's easy to start over.
One of the Gnome developers has started testing an alternitive written
mostly in python. It's advantage is it could maybe do scripting to work
around problems with accessing certain apps. It's access to Gnome
terminal is better than what I get from Gnopernicus. With Gnopernicus,
I have to use flat review mode to read the output from an ls command.
Orca reads it automatically. Unfortunately, orca doesn't have any
review mode yet. Also, the CVS can suddenly get broken. Orca still
looses speech and crashes, so both screen readers have some way to go.
Hope this helps.
Kenny
