I built a wheezy system and have been updating it to current levels for about a year. It lives on a Pentium 4 system with enough resources to run gnome and orca just fine, but this has not happened yet. Up to now, I noticed one could boot the system. The speakup kernel would talk and then everything would seem to lockup when gnome should start. The system was still alive, however, because one could ssh in to it from another system and run command-line sessions with no problem. If I became root on this ssh session and brought the system down with a reboot or halt command, the speakup kernel would begin speaking on the test system for the brief period between when gnome was killed off and the kernel finally died. I was able to use the test system as a command-line debian system by disabling s18gdm3 under /etc/rc2.d. This brings me to the latest experiment. I put s18gdm3 back and told the system to autostart using orca by issuing the following command based on the accessibility wiki: su -s /bin/sh -c 'eval $(dbus-launch) ; export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID ; GSETTINGS_BACKEND=dconf gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled true' Debian-gdm || true If I turn off speakup as soon as it begins to talk on boot, I now get the "Welcome to orca" message and a login window for the first time. I login and then everything locks up, pretty much as before. I can still ssh in and access virtual consoles from another system but still no orca although I think I am close. Any ideas on what is happening? When I log in through orca, a who command via ssh shows me on ttyS7 andI can become root on the ssh session and echo "hello" >ttyS7 and hear the message via orca, but the keyboard is as locked as Fort Knox. Any ideas are welcome. Many thanks. Martin McCormick
