Hay all,
So it’s been a good while since my last post. Since then I haven’t really been using Manjaro at all, mostly sticking with Windows / Mac OS with some Arch on the side. I’ve recently found-out that the Debian team has managed to successfully make Calamares accessible in their live images.
This has given me some incentive to try Manjaro again, especially after seeing that after all those years @Jim.B is still maintaining my croodly made profiles in his SBK spins (Thanks for keeping this alive BTW!)
Manjaro is currently not very installable however, mainly because Architect seems to now be deprecated, and because of how my profiles were made Calamares isn’t accessible.
Given that I’m quite a bit more whize in some areas (and perhaps slightly less in others lol), I thought it might be a good time to pop back in here and ask if anyone would want me to start maintaining this again, and especially if anyone here with more Linux knowledge than I have would be willing to help me make those talking releases better, E.G not autostart orca through a desktop file or other janky ■■■■ like that.
Anyway, shoot me your thoughts!
The team has dropped all community editions except cinnamon and i3.
Adapting the work made by Debian to fit with Manjaro is likely more demanding than you think - but don’t let that stop you.
When working with an installation targeting impaired persons - it is likely better to use something stable like Debian - as using a rolling release like Manjaro, EndeavourOS or Arch would make for way to much instability for an impaired person - no offence intended - just a matter of fact.
Yes, I still use the profile you created. It was also used as the package base for the Debian Talking-Mate spin created by the project. Strangely the screen reader for the Debian spin is able to read Calamares where the Manjaro one does not. I have tried to make it work but I am just not good enough.
The download numbers for the Talking-Mate spins are not very big. I keep making them because there is little else available to visually impaired end uses of linux. Stable Manjaro isnt that bad as a distro for people with visual issues, I would never recommend other branches or something like Arch. Having timestamp and timestamp-autosnap helps.
If you want to do some work on a new profile that allows Calamares to be read by the screen reader in Manjaro it would be a wonderful thing. Even if you end up not building a community edition.
Would there be a way I could get access to the git repos to modify your profiles there directly? A user on the Endeavour OS forum has provided a helpful tip which should make Calamares entirely accessible.
I think this could be a groundbreaking change, especially if we could potentially push it to upstream Manjaro.
I’m downloading the talking iso as we speak to test it on my Thinkpad and will let you know how it goes.
OK, I have just tested this method of enabling accessibility in Calamares and it works perfectly! I think this might be worth doing in the main Manjaro images afterall.
Nice, and it looks like a easy to add option. The step
type export $(dbus-launch) and press enter. This enable dbus variables and allows Calamares to interact with dbus in root session.
Is it stored in dbus config (./.config/dconf) , or is the setting in some other file?
Honestly I’m not sure, I don’t know much about how dbus works.
From what I have read in a quick google search export $(dbus-launch) isnt stored as a setting, and must be done each reboot. Its likely going to have to be entered somehow with a script or systemd service.
Perhaps a quick and dirty way would be to just stick that in /etc/profile? I always do that with all of my accessibility variables like QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1 and such, because for some reason those are still not always enabled on the Linux desktop.
Anyway, do you have git repos of your iso profiles anywhere? I’d love to hack away at the talking profiles if you do.
Also, FYI the community repo is still enabled on the talking iso, resulting in the user having to manually nuke it from /etc/pacman.conf after installation.
I dont have any repos, I mainly backup to my nas and Google Drive. But I do have a website. I have uploaded a tarball with the profile.
https://spinsbykilz.com/talking.tar.xz
Be warned, its package file is organized for how I think. Also since there is only a full version of Talking-mate there are no “extra” tags. The build environment uses a localhost web server for project packages, so you might have to comment out sbk packages. There are three of them in the Packages-live file as well.