[orca-list] about the new sonar distro

[Doug Smith <braillefingers gmx com>]

Hi, everyone, this is Doug Smith.  Lately, I have been made aware of the 
new sonar Linux distro for the blind.  I have to tell everyone this.  I 
am using it right now, installed on my production machine and I am 
liking what I am seeing.

I have to give you a really honest opinion of the distro, and I will.  
There are several characteristics of the system that I really like.

1. I got the classic version and it is running like a top.  On the stock 
ubuntu with unity 2d, I seem to have had a problem when pressing return 
immediately after entering something into the dash panel.  On the other 
hand, I had a few accessibility problems with it.  Not here.  This thing 
is running so fast that, I would have thought it was a new machine if I 
hadn't know any better.

2. ease of installation: This system was so much faster to get installed 
than the stock ubuntu, I couldn't believe it.  Real good stuff!!

3. On the stock ubuntu with unity 2d, the graphical desktop locked up on 
me.  This really ticks me off, as this kind of thing has been a problem 
since I started working with talking computers 27 years ago this month 
and I still see it sometimes.  It happens a lot less in text mode than 
graphical.  Not on here.  This thing has not hung on me one single 
time.  It's really great.

4. Orca never drops on here.  It didn't on the regular ubuntu neither.  
I want to congratulate the Orca development team on stopping that 
idiotic crashing behavior Orca used to have.  It's running smooth as silk.

On the stock ubuntu with unity 2d, the keyboard shortcuts I had to set 
myself were constantly coming undone.  I couldn't depend on alt-tab or 
alt-f4 to be working from session to session.  When I found out that I 
had to remove the ~/.gconf/apps/metacity directory from my home folder, 
I thought all would be well.  It wasn't.  I still fought a running 
battle with the window manager over writing its config to my home 
directory.  Then I fixed it.  It was a dirty hack and a major cludge, 
but it worked.  I removed this file then, as root, did this:

touch ./.gconf/apps/metacity

and this created the new file to replace the configuration directory.  
Well, that wasn't good enough, so I had to put it back and using the 
chmod command, remove all permissions, read, write, and execute from all 
users.  Problem solved.  Not on here.  All the keyboard shortcuts have 
stayed around, even after upgrading the system.  It's great.

6. On the other side, ubuntu with unity 2d, the sound continually muted 
out on its own from session to session.  I have never seen this in my 
life, and I am not sure if any of you have or not, so I will attempt to 
describe it.  Turn on the machine and do some work. All will be well.  
When the machine was turned off and allowed to cool overnight, then 
restarted again the next day to do other things, no sound.  I had to 
have some eyes in here so many times it was really getting bad.  Well, 
adding pavucontrol and the ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev repository together 
solved the problem.  No more pulseaudio problems.  I also did this on 
here, and pulseaudio is really not all that hideous.  It works perfectly 
well except for the distortion for a few seconds when it starts.  How 
does pulseaudio avoid this on the live cd? I guess it's just because 
it's so slow in getting Orca and friends started that all that must be 
out of its system before you hear it.

7.  This sonar stuff has a really good and fast boot time even though I 
have a few extra daemons on here which start at boot time, this thing 
really starts up fast.

I hope the author of sonar gets this.  I want to talk to him on mangler 
or something and let him know personally, rather than just in writing 
how good this distro is.  Please keep gnome classic on this system, and 
you've got a lifelong user.  If the sighted world is going to tell me 
that I have to use a graphical desktop on my machine just to get hold of 
the same functionality and information everyone else has access to, I'll 
be shot down in flames if they're going to tell me what OS or desktop to 
use.  And, by the way, thunderbird accessibility on here is perfect.  
I'm using it to write this message right now.


I just have one question about thunderbird.  How do you set it up such that all the messages in a thread are 
not transmitted back and forth every time you send a mail?  I hate that with a passion and I hope someone can 
tell me how to set it up such that I just send what I wrote and not a quadrilion other messages attached onto 
it each time I post to a list.



Thanks.



--
Doug Smith: Special Agent
S.W.A.T  Spiritual Warfare and Advanced Technology
Forever serving our LORD and SAVIOUR, JESUS CHRIST.