I'm actually going to be installing a few virtual machines on my Dell Latitude here. One of them will run Debian 7, another OpenSuSE 13.2 or whatever the latest is, and the others will be Windows VMs. Oh, and did I mention Debian on the server under Hyper-V on my dell PowerEdge? This is all for learning and getting a taste of everything; while OpenSuSE is not accessible during install, it's as easy as hell for anyone walking you through (my friend did it for me when she had zero Linux experience previously), and while some will say that it is unstable and "too corporate", as another friend of mine will say, for the two days I had it in a VM, it was glorious; I took the time to learn and to just mess around and have fun. I can't say too much for Debian, as I've not experienced it yet, but I love OpenSuSE! -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Chamandeep Singh Grover Sent: Wednesday, October 8, 2014 10:37 AM To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] [program-l] Accessibility of linux Thank you very much for the in depth advice John. Will definitely consider everything. I think I will start out with vagrant and go from there. Once i'm use to the ssh Linux style commands then I will think to move to Linux gradually. Regards, Chamandeep singh On 10/8/14, Bram Duvigneau <bram@bramd.nl> wrote:
The Vagrant setup mentioned here is fine if you want to do editing and such on Windows. It also does shared folders, actually a Virtualbox feature, so you don't have to mess around with sharing files or SFTP (FTP over SSH).
Most Vagrant boxes you'll find are based on Ubuntu. You will be able to handle Ubuntu/Debian servers just fine if you get the hang of that. Having worked with Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Archlinux, I think 80% is just having a good shell/GNU tools knowledge and the other 20% is figuring out how your specific platform does things like package management.
Bram On 8-10-2014 16:01, John G. Heim wrote:
I developed web apps for many years using the model you describe. My workstation was Windows and the web server was linux. I switched to linux full time because part of my job is linux desktop support and I felt I couldn't do that unless I used it myself.
Anyway, I found a text editor that could save files in linux/unix format to be essential. I used a text editor called textpad for this. I also tried ultraedit but it was slow and it crashed a lot. But that was version 11 and I think they're on 2o something now. But even if ultraEdit hadn't kept crashing, I'd have been very disappointed with it's slowness. It took forever to load and open files. Even the keystroke responsiveness was slow. And I had a fast machine with plenty of ram.
The other thing I found very useful was an sshfs client. This allows you to map a Windows network drive via the ssh protocol. So any server running ssh can look just like any other Windows share. At the time I used something called sshfsDrive. It eventually became ExpandDrive but ExpandDrive is totally inaccessible. There is another, open source, sshfs client for Windows. It works okay but it's kind of buggy. Right now I can't recall the name. Googling will find it but it's name is something like win-sshfs.
So this brings up another reason I switched my workstation to linux. The Windows/linux connectivity tools were breaking down. They were getting worse, not better. If you can run samba on the web server, you don't need an sshfs client. Since you are running linux in a virtual machine, I'm going to say that's the way to go.
I think if I was just starting out with linux, I'd start with vinux. I am not sure whether vinux or sonar would be a better bet. Before sonar switched to basing their distro on arch, I think sonar was an easy choice. But vinux is based on ubuntu which is way more popular than arch. Therefore, the knowledge you gain from using vinux is more likely to translate to the real world. Plus, there is a huge ubuntu support community. I am guessing that would make it easier to google for answers. The sonar developers switched to arch because it just works better. It's easier to keep up with the latest accessibility fixes. I don't want to insult the vinux developers, they are awesome. But as good as they are, the sonar developers are even better. It's a tough call. But I think I'd recommend vinux.
Actually, if you're just going to use it as a server, you might consider going with plain old debian. Debian stable is probably the most rock solid operating system in the history of the world. That's a deliberate decision made by the developers. They'd rather be 2 years behind then have something not work. Of course, they still have stuff that doesn't work, every operating system does. Another advantage of debian stable is that the installer is very accessible. I've installed it many a time on a virtual machine and as long as sound works in the virtual machine, the installation was a breeze. Also, during the installation process, you get a chance to set the machine up asa server. You can say you want the machine to be an ssh server, web server, print server, file server, or all of the above. You'd want to select at least ssh, web, and file server. You might still have to do some configuration for the file server part but the web server and ssh server will work out of the box.
On 10/08/14 04:21, Chamandeep Singh Grover wrote:
Thanks for your advice all. I am planning on writing a web application using Ruby on rails, which i'm told works best outside of windows because of its gems. Ben, I agree with you in that the learning curve for a new operating system is often much longer than sighted people and to become productive it can take time. I've now been made aware of something called Vagrant, which helps you to configure a virtual box machine and its possible to use ssh to run the necessary commands. This way, the development itself can be done on windows as well as the testing. The only thing that needs to be done through ssh (for rails at least) is to start/stop server and to run commands for basic db operations. I wil very likely be going with this option since it seems the one with the least curbe.
Thanks Chamandeep
On 10/6/14, Bram Duvigneau <bram@bramd.nl> wrote:
Depending on the language/environment you're working with, a UNIX like platform might be easier to work with.
It's not about editors or IDEs, but about the tooling that is more tested on Linux and Mac OS than on Windows in many circles. Especially if you know you are going to deploy something on a Linux server later on, it's nice to have a matching development environment.
I run a Linux VM on my Windows PC all day and do most of my development in there. When I'm doing web stuff I run Firefox+NVDA on Windows to test. The VM just has a basic command line and no GUI what so ever. I use Brltty and pass the USB connection to the braille display to the VM.
Hope this helps,
Bram On 6-10-2014 18:22, Ben Mustill-Rose wrote:
Hi,
It depends on what you're wanting to develop really. Remember that for actual coding you'll be working inside some form of IDE, so for writing code on its own I can't really see why one platform is going to be better than another. I'm sure some of your developer friends will be extremely productive when coding in VI (a really geeky & hard to use text editor) but becoming productive in that sort of environment won't have happened over night so you may / will most likely find that switching actually decreases productivity, at least in the short term.
I'm going to get put in my place here by people who know more about Linux than I do, but I very rarely find that things work out of the box when it comes to using Linux with a screen reader unless you're using the CLI; even then depending on some things there can still be issues. The only times that it's worked painlessly for me have been when I've been using so called blind distributions such as Sonar or Vinux. Said distributions definitely have their place, but personally I'd prefer something a bit more mainstream (although I am aware that the distributions I mentioned are based on Arch & Debian respectively); I also wonder how successful you'd be in getting an administrator to install an operating system such as Vinux that they won't have heard of onto one of the desktops that they'll have to support.
Obviously we then have the option of mainstream distributions. The problem with these, as per above, is that it's very rare for them to "just work" with something like Orca. If you Google you'll find postings to mailing lists & IRC logs from people who have managed to get Orca working with their setup, but said postings usually don't include instructions & if they do in my experience they rarely work anyway.
You need to determine if the time required to get up to scratch with a new operating system & screen reader will be justified by the potential productivity increase. Bear in mind that unless you go the blind root, with the overwhelming majority of distributions you will have to do a large amount of experimenting, even before you are able to do the most basic of tasks. I love using Debian based distributions over SSH, be that on one of my Raspberry Pi's or my server, but *for me*, there's absolutely no way that I could use it for day to day tasks.
Cheers, Ben.
On 10/6/14, Bill K. Dengler <codeofdusk@gmail.com> wrote:
And so is the text based installer. S tab space priority=low enter
Bill
-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of unix Sent: Monday, October 6, 2014 11:48 AM To: Blind sysadmins list; program-l@freelists.org Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] [program-l] Accessibility of linux
Just wanted to point out as well, the Debian live cd is itself accessible,also, There is one more distro, Debian based Kali Linux, a fork of backtrack, but if your not a pen tester etc, this info is probably irrelevant. I've heard of people using slackware, and hints about orca being available, but I think thats a hole nother ballpark entirely.
On 10/05/2014 05:26 PM, kendell clark wrote:
hi are you looking for how linux and windows differ or which distros to try? There are currently ... 5 distros that are the most accessible, although any linux distribution which includes orca is usable by a blind person, although not all are accessible to install. Thery are: sonar. A distribution based on arch which has both gnome and mate flavors available. Orca is preconfigured to start when the live cd boots, and braille support is also available out of the box if you have a braille display. I use this one. Mate is more similar to windows xp/vista/7 in terms of look and feel, while gnome is more similar to windows 8.1. Arch linux. If you want to use this one, you want to download the talking arch distro from http://www.talkingarch.tk. Arch is probably more geared towards the linux advanced user, although it is installable and usable by a novice, if you are willing to follow the tutorials available on the arch wiki. There are three others, all debian based. Ubuntu, trisquel, and vinux. Ubuntu uses an interface called unity, which is sort of a hybrid between windows 8 and 7, having both touch screen support and a traditional desktop, menus, icons, etc. Trisquel is a "free software" only distribution, so you won't find support for hardware that needs binary firmware, and a lot do. There's also ubuntu mate, which is ubuntu without the unity interface, but with mate instead. Vinux is basically ubuntu with orca preconfigured to start by default, and a different sound theme and wallpaper than ubuntu itself. As for how linux and windows differ accessibility wise ... it's not black and white. There are applications that work better in windows than in linux, such as firefox, although orca's recent improvements in this area make it a lot less of a gap than it used to be. There are also programs taht work better in linux than in windows, gimp and pidgin being good examples. Libreoffice is supposed to work in both windows and linux with screen readers, but I couldn't get it working in windows at all last time I tried. It works out of the box with orca. Things in linux are said slightly differently. To give you an example. A button in linux is said as push button, or toggle button. Toggle buttons are buttons which have either an on or off state, whereas push buttons are just ... well, buttons. The area of the desktop where your icons go is typically said as desktop. Icon view layored pane, instead of "desktop list". text fields are usually said as "text" in applications other than web browsers, and "entry" in browsers. NO idea why. If you can get used to the way things are said, it shouldn't be too difficult. I'm not a programmer, so I can't speak to whether linux or windows is better to develop under. There are people who are on both sides of the fence I'd expect. I do know that there are at least a few accessible ides, bluefish being one, eclipse being another, which work out of the box with orca. Hope this helps, this is a lot to write. Thanks Kendell clark On 10/05/2014 04:54 PM, Chamandeep Singh Grover wrote:
>>> Hi all, >>> >>> I keep getting advised by other developers that Linux is a >>> better platform to develop under compared to Windows. I wanted >>> to explore options for how Linux is accessible and what is >>> available? I've never used Linux so any advice on how things >>> work and how to get setup would be appreciated. I would still >>> like to use my windows machine for day to day work. But would >>> like to have Linux either as a separate installation or a >>> virtual machine. >>> >>> Thanks for any help you can give with this. >>> >>> Regards, Chamandeep Singh ** To leave the list, click on the >>> immediately-following link:- ** >>> [mailto:program-l-request@freelists.org?subject=unsubscribe] >>> ** If this link doesn't work then send a message to: ** >>> program-l-request@freelists.org ** and in the Subject line >>> type ** unsubscribe ** For other list commands such as >>> vacation mode, click on the ** immediately-following link:- ** >>> [mailto:program-l-request@freelists.org?subject=faq] ** or >>> send a message, to ** program-l-request@freelists.org with the >>> Subject:- faq >>> > > _______________________________________________ > Blind-sysadmins mailing list > Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org > http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins >
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