I appreciate all this information. Thank you. I am now in the process of creating a brand new installation. I did make one big discovery. When running the new netinstall image, I found out that I seem to have been using the mouse port instead of the keyboard port for a long time. It worked on the old system but when I booted the netinstall disk, I had no keyboard control at all. I moved the plug to the other port and that must be the keyboard port because I was immediately able to type boot s and it came up talking the first time after that. I had to leave for work after getting as far as installing the base system, but I plan to select the gnome desktop and anything else dealing with orca when I get to that screen, probably tonight. I hope to end up with speakup before and after orca. Should the net gods be smiling today and I get that, I will backup that system before doing anything else. As for being able to use the mouse port on the keyboard, I am thinking the kernel may figure out what one is doing and just work, but that may also be why I was having such odd behavior. If I still end up with no orca, I will download CD1 and try from that but I bet the netinst disk will pull down the correct desktop. Thanks for the warning. Martin Tony Baechler writes: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA256 > > Just do a fresh, new install. I had similar problems as you're having > with an apparently broken Orca. Doing a dresh install solved my problems. > For the first time ever, I got a talking gdm3 login. > > Be aware of a couple of things. First, you must use an image with the > graphical installer. The standard CD 1 works and that's what I > downloaded. Just press "s" after a few seconds and you get speech, but > unfortunately no beep on boot. Secondly, you must install the desktop > environment at the time you install the rest of the system to get > accessibility. You can't install it later. That's what happened to me > the first time. I installed what I thought was the > "gnome-desktop-environment" task after system boot and I got no Orca. > Finally, GNOME 3.X is completely different than 2.X. I got speech when I > logged in and I got the "Welcome to Orca" message but nothing else seemed > to happen. I had to press either the Windows key or Alt-F1 to get the > overview panel to come up which seemed to talk fine, but I didn't know > what I was doing so I didn't get very far.
