Vinux community update

[Rob Whyte]

On behalf of the Vinux team I would like to provide the below Vinux
community update.
The recently released Vinux 5.1 images on the 12th of January have been
popular and the download statistics show over 2,800 recorded downloads
through Sourceforge, with our Torrents also happily seeding. As you
know, this was not a major release, so I think the stats show Vinux
still has a strong following. We also chose to release 4.1 images, which
we had not had much development movement on since spinning the proposed
release. These images have also had close to 900 downloads, which I feel
is pretty good considering there were no release announcements.

Our Vinux funds sit just on $2,334 U.S dollars. This is generated
primarily by kind donations and previous fund-raising efforts. It is
still our hope to become a non profit, and maybe it should be my
new years resolution to make that happen.

Vinux 6.0 is in the works based upon Ubuntu Xenial 16.04. We have an
alpha image uploaded, but though it boots to the desktop, it is not yet
installable. We are confident that this can easily be addressed once we
finish uploading the Vinux seeds to our PPA and do any fine tuning that
may need to take place.

Vinux long ago decided to move from Debian to Ubuntu, as the hardware
support was better and the accessibility was further polished. However,
recent releases of Ubuntu have made it harder for Vinux to do what we
hoped without major development, and taken us further away from our
ability to keep up with the latest accessibility framework. Our Vinux 4
releases were classic examples of that; we had a great release, but were
held back with Orca and the accessibility framework, unless we back
ported half of Gnome.

We have with great deliberation decided to move away from Ubuntu and to
a Fedora base. We welcome community input and are happy to answer any
questions that may arise. Though with any base change to a distribution
there is a learning curve, we are confident after going through the
change, users will feel happy with the simplicity of the installers and
new features and flexibility the change will bring to Vinux.

Basing on Fedora will allow us to be much closer to upstream
accessibility technologies and frameworks, and should mean less work
when it comes to package maintenance. In addition, Fedora tracks
upstream very closely, to the point where for the most part, they will
not carry patches to packages unless they are already upstream. As such,
they trust upstream projects more, and thus if a bug is found, more
often than not it exists in the upstream project.

Fedora also have good tooling when it comes to producing iso images. It
will be very easy for the Vinux project to have an iso image per desktop
environment, for example one for GNOME, one for MATE, and a console only
version, since Fedora does have a console installer.

it will also be easier to be able to get involved with development
should you wish to do so. Fedora maintain all their packaging on git,
and we are likely going to be able to use that as a base for any
packages we want to update or change. As such, we should be able to use
github as the place for all development work, allowing for people to
submit changes if they so wish, and allowing people who have a good
contribution record who know what they are doing to easily be added to
the development on a per package or project basis. Github has a wiki and
issue tracking system, so developer documentation and how to do things
can be documented there, and for any packages we carry, we can track our
bugs there as well.

We have not yet worked out the support lifetime, but it will probably be
based on how long the Fedora project supports the release we base our
releases on.

The Vinux team have for some time been chatting with the Sonar and newly
founded accessibility development team about moving forward and
collaborating on a new project together. We are happy to be able to
speak to this as it evolves, and look forward to our teams and others
being welcome in the future.

Warm regards
Rob Whyte

[kendell clark]

hi

I want to get this out there that though I develop an accessibile
distribution of my own with help, if you guys move to fedora they are
great people and really care about accessibility. I probably would've
switched over to them had I not found and decided to help sonar.

Thanks

Kendell Clark

rote:

[SatyaNarayana Murthy Tanikella]

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Hi,
This is a very good move.
I started using fedora in my starting days with Linux but due to
better accessibility I moved to Ubuntu.
but 1 problem should be addressed.
when ever 1 try to install new softwares accessibility should not be broken.
thanks.

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, All:

I've been a lurker on this list for some time. I should probably add
that, while I installed Vinux once to check it out, I don't use it on
any regular basis. Still, I've long been interested in all community
efforts aimed at making Linux easier for blind users to install and use.

I'm responding to the post below specifically because Fedora is
mentioned as the future base for Vinux. I think it's a great choice for
all the reasons noted. There is, however, one caveat to Fedora's support
for accessibility--the Linux kernel. And, that matters because that
involves Speakup. This has been a blind spot, as it were, for Fedora
going back to the poorly implemented release of Red Hat 8 some 15 years
ago. But, I'm not writing to discuss history, simply to point out what
is, hopefully, something Vinux developers already understand.

As you all know, Speakup is today available as a kernel staging module.
However, neither Fedora itself, nor rpmfusion, the primary omnibus
repository of additional rpms available for installation and management
via dnf, no longer bundles staging modules. Regretably, this has been
true since the 4.0.4 kernel version--whose rpmfusion release was
actually broken, so that the last function version was 4.0.3, if memory
serves.

The impact of this for me personally was to cause me to decide between
devoting time on an ongoing basis to building staging, or even just a
Speakup module rpm extracted from among all the staging modules, and
switching distros. I switched, though my data center hosted server
continues to run Fedora as no local access is required at that machine.

For Vinux I believe this means either building such an rpm, and I do
support using both Koji and rpmfusion, or simply excluding Speakup from
Vinux. I certainly hope you're planning on the former and not the
latter. If so, that would benefit all blind people using Fedora, imo,
and that would constitute excellent PR for Vinux.

I hope this is helpful.

Janina

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--

Janina Sajka, Phone: +1.443.300.2200
sip:jan...@asterisk.rednote.net
Email: jan...@rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup: http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair, Accessible Platform Architectures http://www.w3.org/wai/apa

[B. Henry]

Yes, although I'm very interested in the new userspace console screen reader, and it will be needed sooner or later as console code is removed from the
kernel and taken over by systemd, as long as speakup is usable I will be unlikely to use, support or recommend a distro whole heartedly that does not
include it.
I'm expecting good things from our next-gen console screenreading solution, but speakup has become a vital part of my kit, and its use and keybindings are
part of my muscle memory, its performance and stability will be hard to match, and near imposible to surpass.
That being said, speamup needs finer grained controls, more ways to customize that will stick when desired, and a few other tidbits that I'm not
remembering right now I reckon.
Going to shut up and download the code for the new screenreader, (can never remember its name/wish they'd have chosen something more evocative and or
memorable)...(yeah, probably the nbame means a lot to the guys workingf on the project, but that's not going to help most of us I fear)

--
B.H.
Registerd Linux User 521886


'Janina Sajka' via The Vinux Development Forum wrote:
Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 08:30:32AM -0500

[Zahari Yurukov]

Hi all,
Although I'm Fedora user for the last 15 months , I was happy that the Vinux development continued over an Ubuntu codebase, and I was waiting for a 16.04 version with excitement.
Same about the Sonar development by the way, though Arch Linux and derivatives were never stable enough for my taste.
Regardless, it's always a reason someone would want to run a Manjaro or Ubuntu based distribution, which is already preconfigured and fine tuned for a blind or visually impared person.

I wonder - what happens with Unity 8 and the Mir server? Will it replace completely X11 in Ubuntu 18.04?
Since I haven't heard any news, I assume it's still completely inaccessible, and we can't expect it to be accessible in Ubuntu 18.04.
For me, that makes Ubuntu 16.04, and thus Vinux 6, even more important.
So, please, before moving to Fedora, do a Vinux 6 release, based on Ubuntu 16.04. Don't trash your progress that you've made in the last 13-14 months.
Also, you don't know how it will go with Vinux based on Fedora. Would you be able to do a release every 6 months?
And I'm sure many people will want to stay in the Ubuntu ecosystem.

On the bright side, I'm optimistic about the Fedora distribution and the RedHat ecosystem, since so many of the most active accessibility developers and advocates will shift their attention on it.
There aren't much problems anyway, though it requires a certain learning curve for someone, who comes from Ubuntu.

--
Best wishes,
Zahari

[Rob Whyte]

Hi Zahari,

I would agree with you assuming about Unity 8.

We would prefer as you say to not let our effort over the past years go
to waste by abandoning a Vinux 6 release.

We are trying to iron out the build problems and since most of the hard
work has been done it shouldn't be too much work once images are
installable to release.


We have just been discussing support cycles of which when confirmed we
will let the community know.

We will work with the community and try our hardest to make sure that
people are supported through our mailing lists, IRC channels and wiki to
have a smooth transition.



Thanks for your well thought out email.


Kind regards

Rob Whyte