Pulseaudio : lots of issues, how can I help?

[Les Mikesell]

Janina Sajka wrote:

>>> But, I still launch 24 consoles when I boot, because I actually use most
>>> of them in very specific ways. About 6 of these 24 run screen with 9
>>> separate terminal windows defined by ~/.screenrc. I don't see gnome
>>> terminal replacing that anytime soon.
>> It has tabs, and you can script it; I don't see what wouldn't work
>> with your setup.
>>
> Perhaps when X evolves enough that we aren't limited to it on one
> console. 

X has never been limited to one console - and the consoles are not 
required to be attached to the host.  Fedora's pulseaudio configuration 
may assume otherwise, though.

> Or, perhaps also when the at stack becomes much more robust.
> Right now, while the gui has been usable (for about a year), it's prone
> to something--God only knows what, because when my speech dies I have no
> notion of any error, etc--I simply lose the whole environment.

I'm not sure how it interacts with speech - or even audio at all, but 
freenx with the NX client from www.nomachine.com is fairly robust and 
lets you suspend and reconnect the display, possibly from different 
clients and locations.  You might need to use the commercial version of 
the NX server to get audio to work remotely.

> BTW: Not all my consoles are simple terminal screens. I run 9 mutt
> instances in 9 screen terminals on Ctrl+Alt+F1, for instance. My inbox
> is in Ctrl-A1, Fedora mail in Ctrl-a5, my standards related work in
> Ctrl-a9, etc. Meanwhile, evolution and thunderbird are only marginally
> usable from the screen reader perspective, and not with the same
> alacrity that serves me in mutt. Heck, I can still cite specific web
> pages where lynx does better than firefox3 from my a11y perspective.
> Thankfully, there are plenty examples the other way around, too.

I can't comment on how well you can find things on an NX screen without 
seeing them, but otherwise I find NX to be much nicer than screen in 
terms of being able to keep a whole desktop of programs running on a 
central well-connected host and being able to pick up the display on a 
work desktop, a roaming laptop, or through a vpn from home.  You also 
have access to the native programs on the machine where you run the NX 
client, which might be linux, windows or a mac. I normally have enough 
terminal and firefox sessions running that gnome collates them to one 
task bar item that pops up a list when you click it.

While I don't want text mode to go away, the NX approach fixes a lot of 
the problems with native X.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com