ubuntu 2012.04 issues

[Peter Vágner]

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