Orca From Your USB Thumb Drive

I've just checked in an enhancement to Orca that lets you specify an alternate location for your user preferences settings and customized scripts.

By default, this is the ~/.orca directory. But now there is an optional "-u <user-pref-dir>" command line option.

For example, on Ubuntu, you can plug in your USB thumb drive which contains your own personalized .orca directory, and start up Orca with:

  % /usr/bin/orca -u /media/usbdisk/.orca

There are two further steps:

1. Automatically start Orca specifying this alternate .orca directory, when the thumb drive is inserted. It looks like this can be done by having a (.autorun|autorun|autorun.sh) script present on the thumb drive, but I haven't yet worked out how to enable this to be automatically run.

   Update: This turned out to be trivial to do. I started up System->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media and clicked the checkbox beside the "Auto-run programs on new drives and media". I added an "autorun" script to my USB drive which contained:

         #/bin/sh
         /usr/bin/orca -u /media/usbdisk/.orca
         

   When I plug in the USB drive, I now get a little popup asking if I want to run the script. I press Return, and up comes Orca.

2. Also include all the Orca Python files (and the things it needs like PyGtk) on the thumb drive as well, and adjust the autorun.sh script to use them, just in case Orca isn't present on the system.

   Update: This also turned out to be trivial to do. I checked out the latest Orca source code from CVS and configured, built and installed it with:

         % cvs co orca
         % cd orca
         % ./autogen.sh --prefix=/media/usbdisk/richb/usr
         % make
         % sudo make install
         

   This installed all the various Orca run-time files under /media/usbdisk/richb/usr on my USB drive.

   I moved the .orca directory on the USB drive under /media/usbdisk/richb (for consistency), then adjusted the /media/usbdisk/autorun script to contain:

         #!/bin/sh
         /media/usbdisk/richb/usr/bin/orca -u /media/usbdisk/richb/.orca
         

   I also made sure that Orca was not installed on my hard drive.

   Now when I plug-in my USB drive, I get the "do you want to run the autorun script" popup, and I press return and Orca automatically starts. How cool is that!

All of this works towards the goal of making the Orca screen reader automatically usable from any Solaris/Linux computer running latest GNOME. There are still a few minor nits. For example, there is no announcement of the "do you want to run the autorun script", but we're getting there.

[Technorati Tag: Orca]

[Technorati Tag: USB]

[Technorati Tag: Removable Media]

( Nov 02 2006, 08:36:00 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]