Mate Desktop questions

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Sun Oct 10 17:12:06 UTC 2021


Thanks for the tip on accessing the system tray. While I was able to 
access it, all that it contains is the time/date and the "show desktop" 
icons. I do not know where the WiFi icon is or how to put it there.

Regarding the "no sound" issue...
I determined that the sound is being muted. Luckily, the Thinkpad 
laptops I am working with have a physical mute button, so I can press it 
to unmute the sound and get Orca talking. I am baffled as to why the 
sound is being muted. I am the only person currently using these 
machines and I have no reason to mute the sound.
Therefore, is there a command that I can add somewhere, that can be 
executed during Linux boot, that will ensure that the sound is not 
muted? This will become a much bigger problem for me with the newer 
Thinkpad laptops, that do not have a physical mute button.
Thanks,
John


On 10/7/2021 8:05 PM, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> Isn't Linux Mint still based on Ubuntu? How did they fix the problem of 
> having to log out and back in to get a talking installer that Ubuntu has 
> yet to fix? Ubuntu 21.10 needs to take a page from the Linux Mint 
> playbook to make their installer talk without having to go through the 
> work-around logout login procedure to get it talking. I myself would 
> look at Mint, but I'm not fond of the Debian base. That doesn't preclude 
> my installation of this distro for others, as I have been known to 
> install Ubuntu for its ease of use, although I'm more partial to Fedora 
> Linux these days, especially since it includes flatpak out of the box, 
> and snapd can be installed quite easily. I actually have a couple of 
> snaps working here without any issues.
> 
> 
> First, to get to the panel with the system tray, you usually hold down 
> the alt and control keys and press the tab key repeatedly until you hear 
> "top panel." But if I remember correctly, Mint has no top panel, only 
> the bottom one, so your system tray is there. So if you never hear "top 
> panel," just go to the bottom panel and you're good.
> 
> 
> The sound issue is caused by a conflict between more than one user 
> trying to access sound at the same time. The conflict appears to be a 
> race condition where the first user's sound session doesn't get killed 
> fast enough, so the second user is blocked from using the sound device. 
> This usually is not a problem using Pulseaudio, but for some reason 
> Pipewire still has this problem. I switched up mine on Arch and I see 
> the same thing, even running a talking login screen and then logging in 
> as my normal user on a single-user system. Again, I only saw this when I 
> switched that system to pipewire and installed the pipewire-pulse or 
> pipewire-pulseaudio package, so it sounds like this may be what Mint is 
> doing. It should be possible to resolve the issue using regular 
> pulseaudio. If pulseaudio is already installed and this problem is still 
> occurring, I'm not sure where to look next, unless you can set up a 
> session wrapper script that will kill the user's running pulseaudio when 
> that user logs out, which should happen automatically, but may not be 
> happening early enough. I hope this helps.
> 
> ~Kyle
> 
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