Sonar 2014.1alpha3 is out
First of all, for some months now, I’ve been working alongside Jonathan Nadeau and the ([Manjaro]https://manjaro.org/) team to redesign Sonar GNU/Linux around the Manjaro distribution, which is based on Arch Linux, adding ease of use, stability and a great out-of-the-box experience to the already great and venerable Arch Linux. I am pleased to announce that the redesigned Sonar 2014.1 has reached alpha3, and now includes the long-awaited talking login screen via gdm. It can be downloaded at the Sonar GNU/Linux SourceForge page. As always, it is available for both 32-bit (i686) and 64-bit (x86_64) systems.
TalkingArch gets a new team and a new website
In addition to my work with Sonar, I am very happy to be one of the new maintainers of TalkingArch, an unofficial respin of the Arch Linux live CD/USB image that adds speech and optional braille output so that blind and visually impaired users can perform eyes-free installations of Arch Linux. Chris Brannon, who faithfully maintained the TalkingArch iso since 2008, has named Kelly Prescott and myself as his successors, as he was no longer able to consistently maintain the project. This live image will still maintain consistency with the official install media as much as possible, but should now be synchronized more often, in time with the snapshots of the official install image. I am also providing hosting for the new TalkingArch website and the new support email, as well as seeding the torrent for the iso file. Currently, we still have the iso from August 5, but we are planning to release the next build to coincide with the February Arch snapshot. 2014 will indeed be a great year for Linux, especially Arch and Arch-based distributions.
One of them, about 10 years old, is one we actually still use, although it’s a bit too old to run the Windows XP service pack 3 that was on it when we got it about 5 years ago, and Arch Linux + GNOME was freezing at times, especially when the browser was being used, and was also displaying fallback mode. The other computer has a default BIOS date of October 14, 1999, which I am guessing is the day the BIOS firmware was installed onto the motherboard. The CD-ROM drive appears to be broken, and it was therefore incapable of booting to anything but the hard drive running the same, even slower, Windows XP service pack 3 or a floppy disk. The 10-year-old computer has 512MB Ram, a 20GB hard disk and a Pentium iv processor that it claims runs at 2GHz, but feels much slower than that. The 1999 box actually has 224MB RAM, some of which was added later and is a different brand from the original, a 45GB hard drive, which I can only conclude was added at least 2 years later, and a Pentium 3 820MHz processor. Both of these machines are now running Arch Linux, and are quite happy to run a command shell, and even the XFCE desktop. I had to use a bootable floppy disk image with a USB driver to load Arch Linux, but once I got it installed onto the hard drive, it came up so fast I at first didn’t believe it could have booted so quickly. I then installed XFCE 4.10, and was still impressed with the boot time, and even the responsiveness of the base desktop system overall, including how much Orca far exceeded my expectations on such an old underpowered box. I’m still looking for a leaner browser and office suite to run on the oldest dinobox as I affectionately call it, which actually has the brand name “tiny” on both sides of the case, even though it is as large as my workhorse desktop that I bilt, but the slightly newer Del Optiplex looks like it will run Firefox and LibreOffice with less difficulty now that the desktop environment uses less resources, which are certainly at a premium on both boxes. It’s certainly good to know that although there is little I can do with the hardware on either computer short of rebuilding it from the motherboard up, it is still possible to run a decent modern operating system, and even some modern applications, on both of them.
I'm just a bit late, but I just upgraded and here it is. Sweet!
According to an Arch Linux News release, GNOME3 will be moved to the Extra package repository, completely replacing GNOME2. This may happen as early as today or tomorrow, most likely depending on how soon the mirrors synchronize.
I am aware that much work has been done to get accessibility features up and running, but I have also read that GNOME3 won’t be fully operational with Orca until the 3.2 release. I just performed what is likely to be my last upgrade before GNOME3 is moved, but I don’t really want to ignore the gnome package group in all future upgrades until the 3.2 release, which could break something, I definitely don’t want to stop all upgrades on my system until 3.2 is released, and I most certainly don’t feel like going distro hopping again, now that I found one I really like.
Has anyone reading this tested GNOME3 with Orca? I know that gnome-shell isn’t working well, but does fallback mode work out of the box? What major pitfalls can I expect in this release, and how easy is it to correct any problems I may experience? Feel free to leave your answers in the comments at the bottom of this post, or you can also respond on Identica, Twitter or Facebook, each of which has a link to or a copy of this post.