Unable to install using Orca

[Willie Walker]

Hi Deborah:

Wow.  These are great notes, comments, and questions.  Thanks for taking 
them!  Much of the frustration you're having here is due to the lack of 
good documentation, so I'm glad you're willing to help out with that. 
The rest of the frustration just happens to be with bugs, and we'll work 
on that (and we'll poke the appropriate teams to fix their bugs).

> I have tried installing using the Edgy release and the Feisty Fawn 
> betas, a daily build from March 30 and another from April 4. The results 
> are the same.

Feisty is the better thing to focus on right now.  It has all the 
bleeding edge stuff.  The rest of the stuff is older and doesn't provide 
as much as what is on GNOME 2.18 and later.  We also don't backport to 
the older platforms -- maybe we should, but we just don't have the 
resources to do it.  In addition, bugs and features are being added 
across the board to large number of components besides Orca.  The result 
is that updating all of this on an older platform can be quite 
cumbersome and failure prone for a user.  ;-(

> I tried all the sets of instructions I could find by googling, but will 
> keep this message from getting too lengthy by quoting only from the 
> shortest document which is in the Ubuntu wiki.

http://live.gnome.org/Orca/UbuntuFeisty might be the best thing to start 
from.  Sorry I didn't get this to you sooner.

> After a really long wait, booting finishes, desktop loads, Orca does run.

This is going to go as fast as your machine.  Is the long wait on the 
order of more than 5 minutes?  On my slower machine with a slower CD 
drive, it's usually within 3 minutes.

> In my case the Orca preferences always has focus, it was never necessary 
> to press ALT-TAB.

Yeah - this changed a little bit since the docs were written.  :-( I 
tried to capture the latest behavior on the UbuntuFeisty page available 
from the URL above.

> I can alter the preferences fine, but Braille doesn't work unless I run 
> gnome-terminal, and from that window type:
> sudo su
> brltty -bauto -d/dev/ttyUSB0

Good point.  Orca doesn't start brltty for you.  Instead, it will use it 
if it is available (and BrlTTY needs to be started before Orca starts). 
  The checkbox in the preferences dialog really means "Well...if you can 
find BrlTTY running, use it."  I suppose we could try to do more with 
this (e.g., automagically start BrlTTY), but we chose to keep the Orca 
code simple at this point in time so we could focus our efforts on 
things such as Firefox and other problems.

In addition, Feisty is working on automatically starting brltty if it 
detects that a USB braille device is plugged in.  There have been some 
issues with this, however, so it may not be soup yet.

> online help to read, but other apps work some of the time. It is 
> disappointing that Help, so crucial for a newbie like me doesn't seem to 
> work well with Orca.

The graphical rendering engine for the help application (yelp) is based 
upon the same engine used by Firefox: Gecko.  The Gecko stuff is being 
rewritten entirely and we're working with the team to identify and fix 
things along the way.  As a result, help is going to have issues similar 
to Firefox until we get those things worked out.

> but then goes on to tell me that way of installing won't work because 
> Orca is somehow tied to my current account. This makes little sense to 
> me; I've used brltty and speakup for several years, and never had an 
> issue like that before.

All applications on the system run as a given user.  Applications that 
require root privileges, such as the installer, run as root.  When the 
system is booted via the live CD, you're not running as root.  When you 
run an application that requires root privileges, there's magic to start 
the application as root.

Now here's the rub: the way the accessibility infrastructure was created 
and originally implemented (this goes way beyond Orca) resulted in an 
assistive technology only being able to see the applications on the 
display that were running via the same user as the user running the 
assistive technology.  This means that applications running as root 
would not be visible to the assistive technology if root were not 
running the assistive technology.

Some work has been done to address this problem, but the complete 
execution of the solution has not found its way into Feisty yet. 
So...you need to be aware that the install icon exists, but that if you 
try it, it's not going to be accessible.  Unfortunate?  Yes.  :-( 
Solved in the future?  I hope so.

>>4. Press Insert Q to quit Orca. At this point, you will have no speech, 
> but focus is still in the terminal window.
>  
> Actually, you have to tab to Yes, and press spacebar or enter. but then 
> Orca is gone.

Ahh...good point.  The directions missed the fact that the Orca quit 
confirmation dialog pops up.  I just added that to the WIKI.

>>5. Type "orca --no-setup &" and press Enter. This will cause speech to 
> resume, but Orca will now be running as root.
> That works, at least Orca doesn't pop up any preferences applet, it 
> displays "welcome to orca" in Braille and speaks it aloud.

Very odd.  This may mean that something such as the accessibility 
infrastructure crashed.  It shouldn't do so, but it may have happened. 
At that point, you might try pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to kill the 
desktop and restart it, but you might have to unfortunately just reboot 
from the live CD.  :-(

> I tried altering the instructions, since they didn't seem too 
> trustworthy. I tried rebooting, then following all the same steps but 
> running orca without the --no-setup and it seemed happier. It asked me a 
> lot of questions, but then loaded and continued to read me the terminal 
> screen while I tried out some console commands.

It may have been that the accessibility infrastructure did indeed crash. 
  It shouldn't have, but I suspect it did, and I'm not sure the omission 
of "--no-setup" really had an impact.  How could you tell the 
infrastructure crashed?  Well...Orca wouldn't speak and the desktop may 
or may not hang.

> So I went to the next step in the instructions:
>  
>>6. Type "ubiquity" and press Enter.
>  
> After that Orca reads a long incomprehensible list of what appears to be 
> some sort of ubiquity log output. The date repeats frequently and lines 
> begin with ubiquity: etc. However I don't seem to be able to interact 
> with it. When I press enter, it rereads the output, but it is some sort 
> of tty-console output that is automatically scrolling, like typing Cat 
> with the name of a big text file. There is an occasional $ prompt. I 
> have no idea how to capture this output.

Yech.  Sounds like ubiquity (the installation application) was having 
issues.  Bummer.  It looks like things still are not quite soup yet and 
bugs in the installer and accessibility infrastructure still remain.  I 
do recall Li Yuan making a really really good fix to the accessibility 
infrastructure a couple weeks ago, though.  I'm not sure if that has 
found its way into Feisty yet.

I do know that I successfully performed an accessible install this week, 
however, and that it what I based the UbuntuFeisty notes on.  I also did 
it several times and tried to make sure I followed the directions 
without performing any extra magic.  Maybe I need to try it one more time.

> I would really like to see instructions with a bit more depth. Why for 
> example do you kill orca, then run it again with the --no-setup 
> option?   Is brltty supposed to be already active before Orca? Why are 
> there details about how to set your preferences, but then the next step 
> has you killing Orca, and running it in such a way that it can't use the 
> preferences you just set? The instructions are trying to be user 
> friendly but in not explaining why a step is necessary, they are also 
> only useful if everything works as expected.

Good points.  You definitely have more of a tech writer slant than us, 
so your help here would be great.  We probably should try to meet in an 
IRC chat room or on the phone and try to walk through this together.  I 
suspect we'd get a lot more accomplished in a shorter period of time 
than trying to do it via e-mail.

> I'm so new to this Linux-gui stuff I don't really know how to 
> troubleshoot. If you can tell me how to save an activity log and submit 
> it somewhere, I will.

 From a terminal on a normally booted system (i.e., not a live CD), you 
can type "script".  From that point on, all activity in the terminal 
window will be saved to a file called 'typescript'.  To really save the 
file, however, you need to press Ctrl+d one time once you've decided 
you're done capturing stuff.  Now, as for whether this works with the 
live CD or not, I'm not sure.  I suspect it probably would work, though. 
  To get it somewhere, you'd probably need to scp or ftp it to another 
machine, assuming the network came up when you booted the live CD.

Thanks again!

Will