I haven't used Ubuntu personally since somewhere around 10.x, so I can't comment on whether there is any compelling reason to use an older version over the current LTS, which I believe is 18.04. That said, I'm not sure Ubuntu is the best distro for a Blind or Visually impaired newbie to Linux. Actually, I'm not sure there is any mainstream distro with beginner friendly assistive technology out of the box, with most that have accessibility bundled with their default images only playing some indistinct sound when they've booted up far enough to turn it on, and then requiring the user to enter some keyboard combination. Even as someone who was using Linux full-time for years prior to going blind and has been using Linux for years since going blind, such behavior feels rather user unfriendly, especially to a newbie who might not even know to listen for that sound or that a special key combination is needed. Personally, it would be nice if all major distros would implement a Welcome screen that prints the message: Welcome to [distro name]! Press [accessibility hotkey combination] to bring up Accessibility Configuration. to the screen while playing a recording of the same message and sending it to any autodetected Braille Displays, or simply offered a version of their Live/Install media that boots with speech enabled by default. Wouldn't be perfect, but it would be a massive improvement over the current situation. Anyways, to offer an actual suggestion, if you just want a live system, you might want to give Knoppix a try. It has its issues(it only comes in a bloated DVD version, its mostly 32-bit and as far as I know, theres no way to run it with both a 64-bit kernel and accessibility, the way it installs itself to hard drive is kind of hackerish an not recommended for the faint of heart, booting an unmodified iso without issueing a command at the boot prompt will boot without any accessibility features, and as far as I know, there isn't even a beep to let you know when to do the command to bring up the boot prompt), but it has some of the nicest accessibility features I've encountered under Linux, and if you know how to edit ISOs directly or how to burn one to a flash drive so the drive is read-write, its a one line change to a single text file to make it boot with accessibility features turned on. The file that needs alteration is /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg in the iso, and I believe its the same if you burn to USB first. And the line that needs changing is DEFAULT auto to DEFAULT adriane And I've read that this file, plus other config files in the ISO are padded with trailing hash marks(#) to make it easier to edit them in-place if you open the iso in a hex editor. Granted, still not the most beginner frinedly method, but at least the hard part can be done from within an existing accessible computing environment, and once the edit is made and you have it on a DVD or USB stick, its probably the closest you can get to handing a totally blind, complete newbie the DVD/USB and telling them to "boot this" without needing to give them extra instructions. Of course, this assumes their BIOS is set to boot options that aren't hostile to booting from Optical/Flash Media, and its disturbing how many newer machines do have their boot setting set to something hostile to booting a DVD or USB stick. I don't know which I miss more: the days when booting from the primary optical drive if a bootable disc was present was the default or the days when Knoppix had official CD images that booted in accessible mode without having to change anything. -- Sincerely, Jeffery Wright Bachelor of Computer Science President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list