Okay, let me back up a bit. Knoppix is a Live Distribution developed by Klaus Knopper based on Debian. As a live distribution, it is designed primarily to be run from a DVD or USB flash drive, though it can be installed to a hard drive, though this isn't generally recommended and its installer is a bit quick and dirty compared to distributions actually intended to be installed to a hard drive. Adriane(full name: Audio Desktop resource implemntation and networking environment) is an accessibility suite bundled with Knoppix. By default, a Knoppix DVD will boot to a desktop environment, but if the right command is issued at the DVd's boot prompt, it will instead boot in Adriane mode. When booted in Adriane mode, the sbl text-mode screen reader is started automatically and the user is presented with a menu. Most of the menu options are for common computing tasks such as browsing the web, checking e-mail, editing documents, playing media files, or file management, and most of the menu options will invoke an appropriate text-mode application or serve as a front end to such. There's also an option that will drop you down to the command line and a Graphical Programs option that will give you a choice between launching Firefox with Orca, LibreOffice with Orca, or a full desktop environment with Orca. There use to be three official flavors of Knoppix, each available in both an English version and a German version: Knoppix Cd, Adriane CD, and Knoppix DVD. Knoppix CD booted to a graphical desktop by default, included only the default desktop environment, and fit on a CD. Adriane CD was identical to Knoppix CD, but booted into Adriane by default. Knoppix DVD included the option to boot with a 64-bit kernel, booting into alternate desktop environments, and bundled as much software as could fit on a DVD, but had the same default boot options as the Knoppix CD. At some point, Klaus Knopper got to a point where trimming things down for the CD release took too much time nad effort, and now, the only official Knoppix images are the Enlgish and German versions of the DVd. Again, booting to Adriane is still possible, though the Knoppix boot prompt isn't accessible, which prompted me to learn how to modify the DVD iso to make it boot into Adriane by default. If I'm not mistaken, Adriane utilizes the following text-mode applications for its various components: web browser: elinks. e-mail client: mutt OCR: Tesseract File Management: Midnight Commander Media player: mplayer2 or mpv(both are forks of mplayer) text editing: nano. Text-mode screen reader: sbl Graphical Web browser: Firefox Graphical Office Suite: LibreOffice Graphical screen reader: Orca. Admittedly, I don't really use Adriane much myself, but then again, I've been immersed in the command line for years, and the only reasons I haven't switched back to vanilla Debian is because I prefer SBL to espeakup(the default text-mode screen reader in Debian), sbl isn't available in Debian's apt repositories, and I haven't figured out how to replicate Adriane's ability to launch Firefox and Orca without launching a full desktop environment under Debian. Still, Adriane seems like a good way for someone who's blind and new to Linux to get things done without having to constantly fight with the GUI or needing to jump into the deep end with the command line. -- 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