Hi, I had the identical problem which is why I got sighted help. I don't know what the languages are about because it seems to make no difference. I think somehow it starts the magnifier or something so you get no speech. Also, turning off the computer is fine with a live CD as long as your hard disk partitions aren't mounted. I ended up doing that also. Obviously we had the identical problem and it is because the instructions are wrong. I assume you're using the latest 7.10 release. Maybe their method worked in earlier releases but not now. Yes, MPlayer works very well from the console but I haven't tried it under Gnome. It's recommended to build a custom version from source but not necessary. Kelly Sapergia wrote: > Thanks for letting me know about MPlayer. Regarding starting > Orca, I had a heck of a time trying to get it going when I waited too > long at the boot prompt (last night was the first time I ran Ubuntu > on my own). When I pressed Alt+F2, then typed Orca, it said to choose > a language, followed by a list of various languages the thing could > speak. I tried pressing 1 for default, then enter, but that didn't > work. In the end, I impropperly shut down the computer (not a good > thing to do, I know), and was able to get the system started again > using the method you described. >