The problem is not orca other than we need it to use the system if we are to use the gnome GUI. The problem is sort of like those 35-lamp series strings of Christmas lights. All the bulbs are in series which means that every single last one has to have an intact filament or none of the bulbs will light. You've got a dead string and there is no way to tell what is wrong without checking every socket to see where the circuit breaks. On that system which, in theory, should scream through orca, I have had a sighted person tell me that the desktop shows up on the screen. Orca may be talking away in bursts of electrons somewhere in the system, but the audio is dead. There are no sounds of any kind. A sighted user might not even know the sound is dead until he or she does something that should produce a sound. The actual problem in my case appears to be that live CD's including the last Vinux distribution I tried appear to get the sound part of the setup wrong as I have not heard so much as a click from the sound chip on any ubuntu live CD since version 9. What we have is a dead parrot, in the words of "Monty Python." The sound card is not bad. If I install Debian squeeze with speakup, it roars right along. Mplayer plays music and the hardware is genning right along though pulseaudio is sick. I do have a SB16 and the next step is to get my wonderful and patient wife to help me through the bios setup to either kill the on-board sound chip or make it secondary so the SB16 can be the primary audio device and then try a new live CD to see if we get sound this time. I suspect that once all the hoops are jumped, orca will work fine as the problem occurs before that stage. "John G. Heim" writes: > Huh, you're the second person in this thread to say that about orca. But I > just decided to switch to linux full time a few months ago and it was > pretty much a breeze. I had been using that other operating system too but > almost all the end users I support use linux (all good mathematicians do). > So I felt I was cheating by not using linux. But I have had little to no > trouble switching to linux with orca. I use thunderbird & firefox > constantly. It's not quite as good as Windows/jaws but honestly, I made > the > transition fairly easily. > > > > I am really shocked to hear all these complaints about orca. Not to doubt > you. It's just that it doesn't jibe with my experience at all.
