Hello,
Several days ago I've installed ubuntu 2012.04 to my usb drive for testing.
I will go throught some issues I'm having. If you like you can take this
as a small review. I'm sorry I won't go to much detail while talking
about stuff which already works verry well. That's the nature of many
people. People start talking when they need help or when they dislike
something.
I must say I like the upcoming release of ubuntu because I can already
see a lot of progress. For example I can use thunderbird with many more
messages in a single folder than I was able to previously. Thunderbird
startup takes a bit longer as discussed earlier on this and on the
orca-list but it's verry usable.
The same goes about the menus. Many people argue that gnome 2 with its
main menu structure is better accessible. Maybe access to the aplication
icons is better with classic gnome hower I find access to the items such
as batery indicator, network indicator, chat / messaging indicator,
volume indicator and others more accessible with unity-2d than it used
to be with classic gnome. It's now perfectly integrated into the menu.
The only thing I am unable to do with unity-2d is that I am unable to
see the list of all installed applications. I can see applications on
the launcher I can also press the super key alone and do a search but I
can't browse for an app. I am sure this can be done somehow.
I'm quite impressed how it works but here are some issues and
inconstencies I have came accross and would like to get your feetback on.
- My netbook is a bit old and doesn't have a lot of power. It's still
able to run ubuntu and be usable. At times when doing some inthensive
operations e.g. loading a huge webpage in Firefox or updating parts of
the page dynamically the system is getting a bit sluggish. I know this
is fine however sometimes I don't know whether it's still doing its job
or it has frozen. Perhaps I'm just paranoid and would like to get the
progress each time it is doing something. In such case when the system
is bussy and I'll press some key bindings most frequently orcas flat
review commands the orcas ability to react to keypresses breaks. For
example I can navigate around the desktop using the keyboard but I am
unable to press ctrl key to pause the speech. I need to wait when the
voice is done speaking and then do the other action because interupting
speech no longer works while doing key presses. The cure to this is
restarting orca. I can navigate to the orca main window, find the quit
button and press it using a spacebar. Orca then quits and I am able to
start it again by pressing alt+f2 and typing orca followed by the enter
key press. When Orca is restarted its ability to react to keypresses is
back to normal.
When orca is back to normal I am usually getting a crash reporter saying
that ubuntu had an internal problem. I've been able to use standard
navigation features to dismiss the crash reporter. It then opened
launchpad with new bug form. Sometimes it's the bug about unity I've
also seen a bug related to dbus once. At this point Firefox is working
well however I am afraid orca doesn't use the proper scripts because I
can't navigate the page using quick navigation commands and also I am
unable to use cursor keys for reading. Similar bugs have already been
filled so I was not able to properly read bug descriptions and comments
in this state and I did not reported the issue at the bugtracker.
Another thing I can notice in such a state is that when pressing alt+tab
I am getting no speech output.
While trying to log out or restart the computers using the menu I land
on the desktop, press alt+f10 to bring up the menu and while arrowing in
the menu I can see it is no longer speaking as I am moving over the menu
items. The only way to get back to normal where alt+tab and menus work
is to go to the terminal and restart the pc using the shutdown command.
This is happenning for me quite frequently. I would be pleased if you
might be able to look into this or possible give me some hints on how to
proceed to diagnose it further.
I would be gratefull for possible workarounds as well.e.g. how to
prevent orca loosing its ability to react to keypresses or how to
recover from this without restarting the whole machine.
- On a different note I've read some exciting emails on this and also on
the orca-list recently. Ubuntu 2012.04 is supposed to have ability to
launch orca and get speech output on the login screen. While I was
installing daily live from 22nd of march, I've chosen to log me in
automatically during the install. So now while my PC is booting I am
logged in automatically. After I'm done testing and I'll remain
satisfied I would like to install to the hdd and add multiple users so
other familly members can login as well.
I've tried to test this by going to the devices menu and activating the
item saying logout. I've got a confirmation dialog where I've presset
logout button. After this I've waited a bit and while I did not get any
audible output I've tried pressing ctrl+s . Again I've got no audible
output. Then I've tried tabbing around slowly pressing ctrl+s after each
tab key press hoping I'll manage to get accessible login screen but I
have never succeeded. I had to reboot the machine in order to get to log
back in.
- Now the development really progresses in huge steps so I'm updating my
installed copy quite frequently sometimes even twice a day because
occassionally apport has problems subbmitting crashes when I'm running
old versions of some packages. Can I expect getting the great features
appearing in the latest daily images after updating using either the
update manager or apt-get in the console?
I am asking because login screen access, ability to use HUD and possible
other fixes were only been introduced recently and I don't seem to be
able to test them on my installed system.
- The last issue which bugs me this time is how do I check whether a
bugfix is going to be released or not. By reading some interesting
discussions on empathy in the orca-list I think Joanie has fixed string
mapping so empathy should behave properly with orca and also empathy
developers fixed a crash preventing display of empathy preferences
window when orca is running. Can I see info about release status
somewhere in the bugtracker or do I just need to ask relevant
contributors to push the updates into ubuntu or how does it work please?
Thanks verry much if you are reading this last paragraph, I know this is
a long email. Thanks to everyone making progress, I'm really excited,
I've even contacted our local gnome translators in order to try
translating orca and related packages to slovak.
Greetings
Peter
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