In a seemingly endless trek to get both Windows 11 and debian Linux from a 3-year-old laptop I recently acquired, I had been trying to install debian Linux with orca on to a large-capacity thumb drive. The debian bullseye installs were taking as long as twelve hours or so to do and when I finally got one to finish, it was as slow as molasses in January or the same thing in July in the Southern hemisphere and was completely useless except for ssh logins from another computer using the command-line or console mode. Orca never did anything except an occasional halting error message. Finally, I took a one-terabyte Crucial (Brand name) usb drive and decided to try that. The twelve-hour marathon reduced to less than an hour and the orca installation is talking as well as it does on a desktop system, here. The real problem was the slowness of data transfer in and out of the usb thumb drive. The orca screen reader and mate terminal are responding nicely and fast and all seems well so far. Now for some questions: I am not new to orca but, in the couple of years I have been trying it on the desktop and now, the laptop, I really miss having a command-line console which I can get with no problem if I ssh in to either orca system with a command-line Linux box. This is the standard debian install installation image one can download and it found the laptop sound interface without any special measures such as installing a usb sound card . On some systems, you do get command-line consoles by pressing Control+Alt+F2 and you can go back to the GUI by Control+Alt+f1. I think there are maybe 5 more command-line consoles in which speakup talks. On this installation, Control+Alt+f2 prompts one to type a command or ESC to exit. One of the other just kills speech and nothing much seems to happen. Like the spoiled rich kid on Christmas morning, I want it all but not in a nasty way so I am not complaining. If necessary, I could get another hopefully fast usb drive and install debian without the GUI and get the consoles but since this is a laptop, every extra piece of gear makes it less portable. Also, Every instance of Linux one makes will have a different ssh host key unless one copies the same key to all instances. Otherwise the systems you are using ssh to talk to think something's wrong when they see the different host keys. I would also like to say some good words about slint. I was able to get a command-line set of consoles but the only way I could get anything to talk was to plug in a usb sound card. One such card was a Creative Labs SoundBlaster series usb sound card which worked perfectly for the speakup voice plus I also tried another very inexpensive sound card which also worked with no difference between the Creative Labs and the sound card whose name escapes me, but slint couldn't automatically find this laptop's built-in sound card. Everything else in slint that I tried appears to have no problems . Sound system hardware is so proprietary that audio issues in Linux are like grains of sand on the beach, common and gritty when you have to deal with them. So, my primary question is am I missing something about the command consoles? The mate terminal seems to be working but it's not quite the same as a command-line console. Martin _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list