Switching Qs: Sequencers, Colors, HW Compatibility

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi list,
It's been ages since I've posted here. In brief I planned doing GTK plus 2 
development under VmWare but found out that the Cygwin console and my 
Windows based AT was a much easier route at this point. Now I just popped in 
the Edgy live CD in my main music machine and wonder of wonders it came up 
with Orca right after the boot. This is the first time a LInux distro has 
recognized my TerraTec EWS88 MT soundcard. I recall how tough getting 
Gnopernicus speaking was back in RedHat so things have certainly advanced a 
whole lot.

As it works this well, now I'm thinking of possibly installing Edgy in 
addition to the XP I already have. But if I'm going to do any real work in 
Linux, rather than just play around with it, I'd need to find out a few 
things.

1. Is eSpeak already included in Edgy and if it is how do I enable Finnish 
support and also make it show in the Orca list of speech synths? Being a GUI 
guy at heart, I do hope we'll get graphical means of adding speech synths 
some day. I vaguely recall it was about editing some text file for a generic 
speech synth driver.

eSpeak is extremely important to me as without Finnish support I have to 
return to the MS monster to read my mail, argh. Also I do hope Orca has a 
shortcut for switching the language in which Screen text is being read as I 
alternate between Finnish and US English quite often, especially in e-mail 
and the Web.

2. Is there a decent, accessible MIDI sequencer for Gnome out there? NOthing 
fancy, multiple tracks, event list, quantize with a strength parameter and 
the ability to support several hardware MIDi synths with instrument names 
would be good enough. A friend of mine whose a long-time LInux user told me 
about the upcoming Ubuntu Studio and that Ardour 2 will have MIDI and is 
GTK+ based. I might be better off waiting for the Studio to come out for an 
easier time with music making.

3. I use a combo of speech, braille and magnification to manage. There are a 
couple of questions I have regarding the visuals. firstly, how should I set 
up the magnifier screen coordinates in Orca to get a wide, rectangular 
window at the bottom of the screen similar to a docked Microsoft Magnifier, 
if you will. By default the magnifier takes all too much space in my 
opinion.

Secondly, and this is a long pet-pieve of mine, is there still no graphical 
way of seting up the colors in a Gnome theme? I like how KDE does it 
immensly but too bad QT4 support isn't mainstream just yet. I've tried a 
couple of times to find out official docs or an easy tutorial of how the 
theme files need to be modified to simply change some of the background 
colors but haven't been succesful so far.

For me it is extremely important that elements have a contrast difference to 
stand out from each other, even without magnification. So black buttons, 
menu highlight and title bars, dark turquoise dialogs and off-white fields 
would give nice contrasts to me. None of the themes are good enough in this 
regard. Redmond is one of the best. Surprisingly, the high contrast schemes, 
just as in Windows, are totally black or white. This means that i cannot 
tell easily where a dialog ends and a field inside it begins so this is 
actually one of the worst schemes for me personally. I also find pure white 
a bit dazzling in the long run.

4. Finally, how do I determin for sure whether a piece of hardware is 
compatible with Ubuntu. I.e. is there an official hardware compatibility 
list? I tried looking at the detected hardware in the Gnome device manager 
but when I move in the tree control it updates extremely slowly as it 
probably probes the devices on focus change. The update takes several 
seconds during which the whole tree becomes white, i.e. an invalid client 
area in MS Lingo I suppose. Also when I tab around the dialog, it says 
unknown or something along those lines for the text fields that are 
describing the currently selected device on the right.

In particular, I'd need to be sure that my M-Audio (formerly MIDIman) USB 
MIDI Sport 4x4 as well as its 1x1 counter part do work in Linux. If they 
don't, that means no music making in Linux as I rely on hardware synths and 
analog mixing mostly. I might get some particularly LInux compliant hardware 
for my next machine but not for this old one. The last time I asked about 
the MIDI Sports, which was a couple of years back, the 2x2 model was 
supported but 4x4 was not.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated.
And sorry for the flurry of questions. I thought I'd make sure Linux can 
actually deliver in the areas in which I need an OS to do that, before even 
installing a copy on my ancient 40 GB hard drive. Well Linux does much 
better in this regard than OS X, which currently has no Finnish speech, no 
way of tweaking the colors as much as I'd like and no accessible MIDI 
sequencer to my knowledge.

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/