Experiences with live cd 20060429.

Henrik Nilsen Omma henrik at ubuntu.com
Mon May 1 23:02:05 BST 2006


Hi,

I'm copying in the -devel list to which is read by the people who work 
on the Live CD and Ubiquity (the live CD installer). We have a known 
accessibility issue regarding the use of gksudo for the gui config tools 
in that the accessibility information fails to get to the access tools 
run by the user.

It turns out that this problem occurs with Ubiquity as well, even though 
one does not have to enter any password to run it. The end result is 
that users who rely on certain assistive technologies will not be able 
to use Ubiquity as it is configured now.

So clearly gnopernicus is not getting the information it needs and this 
will tend to be a unique issue to Ubuntu because of the way we use sudo. 
I tested the Live CD last week with at-poke and I _was_ able to find the 
strings that appear in the installer interface, so they are being picked 
up by AT-SPI at some level. Most of the meta information was blank 
though. I'm not sure how gnopernicus goes about fishing out information 
from such an interface. Presumably the scriptable Orca can be made to 
pull out the right info from a given app.

A quick test of a few admin tools with gnopernicus give good results 
generally (on an updated dapper system). I get a password dialog that 
speaks and also a config tool that works as expected (Disk and Services 
managers read out info and seem generally well behaved). -- has this 
just been fixed? The password dialog used to be one that grabbed the 
whole screen before.

- Henrik

Al Puzzuoli wrote:
> First, the good news is that Festival now works!
>  
> As was discussed a few days ago, the accessibility flag is not being 
> enabled; However, this issue can be gotten around fairly easily, by 
> letting Gnopernicus enable the flag and then logging off the active user.
>  
>  
> The first issue I ran into was that upon logging back in and 
> attempting to run gnopernicus, I got all kinds of instability 
> involving gnome-panel.  This issue is not unique to the live cd, and 
> impacts Orca as well.  The only workaround I know of for the time 
> being is to run gnopernicus  either from gnome-terminal, or from the 
> console.
>  
> So basically, I found that at present, it is possible after a bit of 
> fiddling to get up and running with an accessible desktop via the live 
> cd;However, I  came up against a show stopper when I attempted to 
> install the system to my hard drive.  I  found that the installer's 
> window wasn't being read at all by gnopernicus, and after looking at 
> the properties for the installer's desktop item, I noticed that the 
> command to launch the program makes use of gksudo.  The problems posed 
> by sudo have been discussed on this list and are also outlined in the 
> following bug:
>  
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163132
> However, that bug has been opened for quite some time, so I'm 
> wondering whether as a short to intermediate term solution, it would 
> be possible to change the command for the installer so as not to 
> require sudo?
>  
>  
> Again, this was saturday's CD, and perhaps some changes have been made 
> since then, but that brings me to another question.  Is there any way 
> to see a log of changes made to each daily release before actually 
> deciding whether to download it?
>  
> Thanks,
>  
> --Al
>  




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