The thing about no live desktop is an explicit arch decision, could even
say it's a feature, same about gentoo, but gentoo has, or did have at
some point, a live image.
W dniu 21.09.2015 o 13:56, Tony Baechler pisze:
All,
I've been following the Talking Arch discussion with great interest.
I'm sure what I am about to say will be rather unpopular, but I can
only go by my own experiences and what I've read. If these issues can
be addressed, I think both distributions have great potential, but as
things stand now, I can't recommend them. I'll start with Arch first.
I had no problem downloading Arch and burning it to a CD. It fit on a
CD without difficulty, but apparently the current release doesn't.
That is most unfortunate as not everyone wants to burn a DVD for a
command line based distro. You expect it with Fedora and Ubuntu, but
even Debian has several small CD images for installation. Hopefully
something can be done to get it back to CD sized media.
Unlike what Kyle says, I couldn't get speech upon boot. I pressed
Enter at least six times, plus other random characters. I've also
encountered the problem where speech starts after a few keys, but not
in this case. I know where the problem lies. It's because of my
sound card, specifically the emu10k1 driver. It has a weird problem
with no volume by default. It isn't muted, but the analog switch is
toggled. This was fixed a long time ago in Debian and Ubuntu, but
obviously didn't make it to Arch. I reported this to the support
address and didn't get a reply for about two weeks. There was no
interest in fixing the problem, even when I offered to help.
Similarly, due to how brltty is configured by default, it locked up my
DECtalk Express. I had to reset it by turning it off and on before it
would talk again. Again, in the same email, I reported this to
support and there was no interest in fixing it. In looking at the
brltty.conf installed with Debian testing, it looks like literally
just commenting out a line would fix this. I understand that some
people still use serial Braille displays, but USB autodetection is the
default and serial devices aren't very common nowadays, so the serial
detection can probably be safely disabled. People can still start
brltty by hand or edit brltty.conf directly.
Finally, due to its unofficial nature, it is not officially supported
by the Arch developers, so there isn't a way to file bugs in a public
forum, such as a bug tracker. It has the same problem as Vinux (which
I also don't recommend) in that there are only two active developers
working on it. If one of them gets sick or for some reason can't keep
up with the latest releases, so much for Talking whatever. I am
strongly against specialized distributions for the blind exactly for
this reason. Whatever happened to Oralux? Both Debian and Ubuntu do
have accessibility teams and the developers take accessibility issues
seriously.
Although I like Gentoo in concept, I can't recommend it for different
reasons. As others have pointed out, it's very complicated to
install. Unless you really like the command line and have a serious
Linux/Unix background, you're going to really struggle to get it
finished. It took me about a week from start to finish. Debian and
Ubuntu take me an hour or two. It's all very well to say Linux is for
everyone, but most people won't have the patience to go through
literally a book to get their system up and running. I think even
Fedora is better now in this regard, but I haven't tried it yet.
When I did get Gentoo finally working, I was forced to install Apache
2.0 when I didn't want it. This was about 10 years ago, so hopefully
this has changed, but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get 1.3 to
install due to it being masked. I found a way around the mask by
forcing it, but I ended up with a broken install. What was the last
straw was when the computer completely locked up due to a kernel
issue. There seemed to be no way to fix it and I quickly realized
that Gentoo is many things, but stable isn't one of them. I would
never again attempt to use it in a production environment. It would
be nice if they would tell you it isn't for servers.
Finally, here is the biggest reason why I can't recommend either
Gentoo or Arch. They don't have a live CD/DVD with a working
graphical desktop. As much as I don't like Vinux, it does come up
with a desktop which you can try. Ubuntu is the best in this regard
in my opinion as it plays a sound so you know it actually works. I'm
not going to make Windows comparisons here, but if the Linux community
wants the blind Windows community to take Linux seriously, there needs
to be a talking GUI which just works. Unless someone really likes DOS,
they aren't going to like the command line enough to give it a fair
chance. This applies to the sighted community as well.
What do I recommend? For people who do like the command line and have
a strong DOS background, I recommend Debian. It has a talking,
menu-driven installer. The command line is there if you want it, but
it isn't required. For most people, I recommend Ubuntu MATE. It's
fast, stable, works on old hardware, has a very familiar feel to
Windows and the live DVD just works for the most part. Since Ubuntu
gets fixes made in Debian, I don't have the sound card problem.
Ubuntu does not enable brltty by default, but again, it's a matter of
changing one line in /etc/default/brltty to enable it. I was able to
fully install Ubuntu without sighted help. I was able to navigate to
one of my NTFS partitions with lots of mp3 files, open the folder I
wanted, select a file and play it. All of this just worked without me
having to do anything special. Once I got it working, of course I
tweaked it to suit my needs, but I wasn't required to do so. It was
my own choice to remove Pulse, for example.
In conclusion, I run a Linux support business, so I darn well better
specialize in Linux support and know what I'm talking about. I've
received several complaints about both Arch and Vinux which I won't go
into here. Generally, if I get people interested in Linux, they want a
GUI. I very much subscribe to the belief that Linux is for everyone,
even to saying that no one should require an unofficial distro.
That's why I almost always recommend Ubuntu. I would recommend
Fedora, but they were very opposed to accessibility in the past, to
the point that they referred people to speakupmodified.org. For all I
know, you still can't install a server release of Fedora with Speakup.
I've begun working on a Debian live CD due to the fact that the
official live CD doesn't come up talking, but it is 99% identical to
the official CD except for accessibility packages. The accessibility
features can be easily turned off with two commands and anyone can
build their own live CD (with live-build) if they have the patience.
I don't doubt that Talking Arch is very good and is similarly
identical to the real Arch, but someone unfamiliar with Arch (such as
me) apparently can't download an official Arch CD and have speech.
This problem will eventually be fixed in the Debian live CD, in which
case my CD hopefully won't be necessary.
--------------------
Tony Baechler, founder, Baechler Access Technology Services
Putting accessibility at the forefront of technology
mailto:bats@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: 1-619-746-8310 Fax: 1-619-449-9898
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