I'd say vanilla Knoppix running in Adriane mode would be a good choice for a blind Linux beginner... though there's a few caveats: 1. There hasn't been an official Knoppix ISO with Adriane as the default boot option for several years... It's just a one line change to a single plain-text config file to make Adriane the default, but I'm aware of no simple means of making this change. I usually end up mounting the iso, copying it's contents to a folder, making the change, and building a new ISO everytime I need to make a new LiveDVD... things might be simpler if you're comfortable writing an iso to flash media. 2. Knoppix can be installed to harddrive, and my running system is a highly customized harddrive install of Knoppix, but Knoppix is designed as a Live environment first and foremost and lacks a few things you generally want in a harddrive-installed OS. For one, the default knoppix user doesn't have to sign-in when booting into Adriane mode and doesn't have to enter a password when running sudo to perform administrative tasks. 3. New public releases are infrequent and with no clear schedule. Knoppix uses the software repositories of Debian, so if you're familiar with apt and are running from a Flash drive or hard drive, you can keep things up to date, but if you're running a Live DVD, you might have to wait a year or more for a new version of the whole system to be made available. That said, when booted in Adriane mode, Knoppix presents a text-based menu that's very accessible and serves as a front-end for performing several common tasks using various console applications, the menus being navigatible with arrow keys or by typing the first digit of a menu item's entry number to jump to it and with the 0th entry being a guide on how to operate SBL, the text-mode screen reader Knoppix uses for console speech. The menu also includes an option for dropping down to the command line where typing exit will take you back to the menu and the option of launching graphical applictions with the option to launch Firefox or LibreOffice as stand-alone with Orca or to launch a full desktop environment(Knoppix defaults to LXDE, though the disc also contains Gnome and KDE if I remember correctly). Admittedly, I don't use most of Adriane's features myself due to familiarity with the command line, but I continue using Knoppix because I have no idea how to get SBL running on vanilla Debian or how to replicate Adriane launching Firefox+Orca without needing to bother with the rest of the Desktop environment. -Jeffery _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list