about 10th new install of bullseye

[Gene Heskett]

Two problems:


terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.


I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me berzerk with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth limited, or worse, than a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the time. I purposely did NOT even visit those pieces of the installer for fear it would be enabled, because even though killed by removing brltty in the previous install, 90% of the syslog was errors because it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway. So how do it get rid of it without it tearing down the system with its copius error screaming?


Thanks for any advice on these two fronts.


Cheers, Gene

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

Hi Gene


Check permissions on spools etc - how did you copy your data out?
A tar ball preserving permissions is also quite useful for this.
Goodness, what do you keep to make your /home directory 122G?

Post by Gene Heskett
I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me berzerk with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth limited, or worse, than a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the time. I purposely did NOT even visit those pieces of the installer for fear it would be enabled, because even though killed by removing brltty in the previous install, 90% of the syslog was errors because it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway. So how do it get rid of it without it tearing down the system with its copius error screaming?

Just a thought: apt rdepends brltty reveals a small number of things
that depend on it. Use apt-get / aptitude or whatever to remove these in
order.

I don't know _why_ you keep getting brltty installed - disconnect any
serial leads from this machine as a start. If you can't get brltty
removed as above - copy your home directory off again and do a reinstall
with the minimum connected to your machine.

[The serial idea is because I seem to recall that if brltty finds a serial
connection active at install, it may assume there's a brltty installed.

In something of 150 or more installs of bullseye - we do a bunch with
each release of images with a point release - I don't think I've ever
seen brltty installed "by accident" so I'd love to know exactly what you
do do each time.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

Post by Gene Heskett
Thanks for any advice on these two fronts.
Cheers, Gene

[Andy Smith]

Hello,

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
In something of 150 or more installs of bullseye - we do a bunch with
each release of images with a point release - I don't think I've ever
seen brltty installed "by accident" so I'd love to know exactly what you
do do each time.

It is really bizarre that this keeps happening to Gene and I can
only think it is, as you say, something to do with the serial
devices he has connected at install time.

Will the installer logs give any hint as to why brltty gets
installed? If so perhaps he could try saving those before letting
the installer reboot, and put them somewhere for us to see.

Cheers,
Andy

[Curt]

Post by Andy Smith
Hello,

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
In something of 150 or more installs of bullseye - we do a bunch with
each release of images with a point release - I don't think I've ever
seen brltty installed "by accident" so I'd love to know exactly what you
do do each time.

It is really bizarre that this keeps happening to Gene and I can
only think it is, as you say, something to do with the serial
devices he has connected at install time.

In a long-ago thread we speculated Gene had an ft232 connected to his
machine, which was mistaken for a refreshable braille display and so
brought in brltty as a consequence.

Post by Andy Smith
Will the installer logs give any hint as to why brltty gets
installed? If so perhaps he could try saving those before letting
the installer reboot, and put them somewhere for us to see.
Cheers,
Andy

--

[David Wright]

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

Check permissions on spools etc - how did you copy your data out?
A tar ball preserving permissions is also quite useful for this.
Goodness, what do you keep to make your /home directory 122G?

I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.

$ dfree
Filesystem IUse% Type 1MB-blocks Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4 19% ext4 30830 26224¹ 3016 90% /
/dev/sda2 - vfat 520 7 514 2% /boot/efi
/dev/dm-1 2% ext4 428208 382990 23396 95% /home
$

A large /home seems sufficient reason to mount it from a separate
partition. Then all you have to worry about when you reinstall is
which of your dotfiles do you let the fresh system get to see, and
which do you hide (in case they're causing problems).

¹ /var/cache/apt-cacher-ng/<2½ versions> occupies ~13GB.

Cheers,
David.

[Greg Wooledge]

Post by David Wright
I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.

unicorn:~$ df -h /home
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8 23G 17G 5.0G 78% /home

[The Wanderer]

Post by Greg Wooledge

Post by David Wright
I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.

unicorn:~$ df -h /home
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8 23G 17G 5.0G 78% /home

aorta:~$ df -h /home/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_data_aorta-lv_home_aorta 11T 5.6T 4.4T 57% /home

Though to be fair that's (part of) an... 8-drive?... RAID-6 array, and
this system's storage capacities are *utterly ridiculous* for most
consumer purposes.

[David Wright]

Post by The Wanderer

Post by Greg Wooledge

Post by David Wright
I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.

unicorn:~$ df -h /home
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8 23G 17G 5.0G 78% /home

aorta:~$ df -h /home/
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_data_aorta-lv_home_aorta 11T 5.6T 4.4T 57% /home
Though to be fair that's (part of) an... 8-drive?... RAID-6 array, and
this system's storage capacities are *utterly ridiculous* for most
consumer purposes.

# ssh -X wren
Linux wren 5.10.0-11-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.92-1 (2022-01-18) x86_64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Last login: Fri Feb 18 14:20:22 2022 from 192.168.1.14
wren 20:54:02 ~# ls -GRagl /home/
/home/:
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 4096 Jan 31 19:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 4096 Feb 14 22:53 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 Jan 31 19:30 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 4096 Jan 31 19:30 admin

/home/admin:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 4096 Jan 31 19:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 4096 Jan 31 19:30 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 680 Jan 28 12:38 .bashrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 807 Jan 1 11:29 .profile
wren 20:54:11 ~#

by way of contrast!

Cheers,
David.

[r***@gmail.com]

Post by Greg Wooledge

Post by David Wright
I'm not sure what's eyebrow-raising about 122GB under /home.

unicorn:~$ df -h /home
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8 23G 17G 5.0G 78% /home

I want to play to:

***@s19:/usr/share/man$ df -h /home
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb12 1.9G 1.3G 489M 73% /home

[David Wright]

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means, nor what is significant about 15 seconds
when booting. I have systems that boot in <3.5 seconds and other that
take nearly a minute. Nor am I sure what's special about /home with
respect to booting — it should have no role.

Post by Gene Heskett
I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me berzerk with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth limited, or worse, than a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the time. I purposely did NOT even visit those pieces of the installer for fear it would be enabled, because even though killed by removing brltty in the previous install, 90% of the syslog was errors because it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway. So how do it get rid of it without it tearing down the system with its copius error screaming?

Um, perhaps https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/05/msg01001.html

Cheers,
David.

[Felix Miata]

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

Post by David Wright
nor what is significant about 15 seconds
when booting.

Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.

Post by David Wright
I have systems that boot in <3.5 seconds and other that
take nearly a minute. Nor am I sure what's special about /home with
respect to booting — it should have no role.

It's about protecting user data against unexpected installation results.

[Greg Wooledge]

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

But what are the *actual* symptoms? What did Gene see? What did he
try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?

These are basic questions that someone with Gene's level of experience
shouldn't need to be asked.

[Cindy Sue Causey]

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net
installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to
a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses
to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

Post by David Wright
nor what is significant about 15 seconds
when booting.

Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.

That's what I understood, too. Mine's occasionally doing something
like that. It seems to be tied to CPU temperatures (overheating).

It's really kind of weird. It's for that first few seconds of booting
where it's running through a checkup before those boot messages begin
appearing. When mine keeps flicking off like that, fanning it with a
piece of paper gets it past that hump then it doesn't do it again.
It's like something in the first stage is pushing the CPUs hard then
it backs off once those messages start scrolling.

That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
computer just stopping and standing at that screen, or is it shutting
off? Mine shuts off. This might be an apples and oranges thing where I
typed a bunch of noise. :)

Cindy :)

[David Wright]

Post by Cindy Sue Causey

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net
installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to
a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses
to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

Post by David Wright
nor what is significant about 15 seconds
when booting.

Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.

That's what I understood, too. Mine's occasionally doing something
like that. It seems to be tied to CPU temperatures (overheating).
It's really kind of weird. It's for that first few seconds of booting
where it's running through a checkup before those boot messages begin
appearing.

What I call the POST? Yes, well in the olden days, when we had real
CRTs, and "everything" ran at VGA resolution, you could sit back for
a minute and watch the whole light show: Graphics card, BIOS, POST,
Lilo, Kernel, and all the dmesg stuff, with the odd screen clearance
but no noticeable change in mode. (I used to scroll back and cut and
paste everything post-POST into an archived file.)

Nowadays, with these fancy flatscreens, each change in mode can lead
to a significant blank period (seconds) while it sorts itself out.

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
When mine keeps flicking off like that, fanning it with a
piece of paper gets it past that hump then it doesn't do it again.
It's like something in the first stage is pushing the CPUs hard then
it backs off once those messages start scrolling.

Do you mean that you hear the fan going at full speed? Yes, that's
quite normal AIUI, and seems very sensible: if nothing is monitoring
the temperature of the system, then running the fan is the failsafe state.

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
computer just stopping and standing at that screen,

Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
or is it shutting
off? Mine shuts off.

Cheers,
David.

[gene heskett]

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the
net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T
raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back,
but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to
post this.

No idea what funkity means, nor what is significant about 15 seconds
when booting. I have systems that boot in <3.5 seconds and other that
take nearly a minute. Nor am I sure what's special about /home with
respect to booting — it should have no role.

Post by Gene Heskett
I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me
berzerk with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth
limited, or worse, than a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the
time. I purposely did NOT even visit those pieces of the installer
for fear it would be enabled, because even though killed by removing
brltty in the previous install, 90% of the syslog was errors because
it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway. So how do it get rid
of it without it tearing down the system with its copius error
screaming?

Um, perhaps https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2019/05/msg01001.html

At 87 yo, you're expecting me to remember a post I made, what, 3 years
ago? But its pretty close to exactly it. But I still don't recall if I
unplugged the adapter that time, and by now there is probably at least
one more, maybe two in my usb tree.

Post by David Wright
Cheers,
David.
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.

[Gene Heskett]

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

But what are the *actual* symptoms? What did Gene see? What did he
try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?



Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark, forever. I let it set there once for several hours while I caught some shuteye.


Repeated at least 20 times.



Putting the install dvd in that drive, and selecting rescue mode, works and I was able to make a backup of /home. Then I reinstalled. And on the reboot after the install this PITA of a blast of unintelligible noise per keystroke was back and I did not go anywhere near those menu item for this install.



These are basic questions that someone with Gene's level of experience
shouldn't need to be asked.



Maybe so but I also getting upset with the feigned ignorance of what I type you won't believe. I said it stopped at about 15 seconds and I don't understand your lack of comprehension of the word "stopped". At that point, the only thing that worked was the front panel of this 30" towers reset button, or after a delay, the power button.


Right now I've removed brltty and its api library which stops he racket of unintelligible sound, but my syslog is growing by abut 6 lines of errors per keystroke because brltty can't be found, or about every 4 or 5 seconds even if the keyboard isn't in use.

I need to find a way to remove this stuff w/o eviscerating half the system with its dependencies. Respin the installer for 11-4 if needed but this needs fixed.



I'd also bet you a six pack of suds it won't reboot right now because I have removed brltty, and that IS the 15 second showstopper. But if my theory is correct, it will also add to the reinstall count which is already annoyingly high. Which with this system means at least a day to do it.


Give us back stretch, once the install was fixed so it had networking, it just worked, till hell froze over.


Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel load line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I have to reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it. That would be a great help.



Thanks Greg, take care and stay well.


Cheers Gene

[David Wright]

Post by Greg Wooledge

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

But what are the *actual* symptoms? What did Gene see? What did he
try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?
Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark, forever. I let it set there once for several hours while I caught some shuteye.

Typing /stop in my MUA shows that the line immediately above this one
contains the first occurrence of the word "stop" in this post.

Post by Greg Wooledge
Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel load line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I have to reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it. That would be a great help.

Add the string systemd.show_status=true

Removing quiet might get just too verbose, because I believe
you can no longer scroll back like in the olden days.

Cheers,
David.

[Gene Heskett]

Post by Cindy Sue Causey

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot,
would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net
installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to
a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses
to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

Post by David Wright
nor what is significant about 15 seconds
when booting.

Boot messages scroll on vtty 1 normally for about 15 seconds, then quit.

That's what I understood, too. Mine's occasionally doing something
like that. It seems to be tied to CPU temperatures (overheating).
It's really kind of weird. It's for that first few seconds of booting
where it's running through a checkup before those boot messages begin
appearing.

What I call the POST? Yes, well in the olden days, when we had real
CRTs, and "everything" ran at VGA resolution, you could sit back for
a minute and watch the whole light show: Graphics card, BIOS, POST,
Lilo, Kernel, and all the dmesg stuff, with the odd screen clearance
but no noticeable change in mode. (I used to scroll back and cut and
paste everything post-POST into an archived file.)

Nowadays, with these fancy flatscreens, each change in mode can lead
to a significant blank period (seconds) while it sorts itself out.

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
When mine keeps flicking off like that, fanning it with a
piece of paper gets it past that hump then it doesn't do it again.
It's like something in the first stage is pushing the CPUs hard then
it backs off once those messages start scrolling.

Do you mean that you hear the fan going at full speed? Yes, that's
quite normal AIUI, and seems very sensible: if nothing is monitoring
the temperature of the system, then running the fan is the failsafe state.

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
computer just stopping and standing at that screen,

Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
or is it shutting
off? Mine shuts off.

Cheers,
David.


And mine stops, period. keyboard dead after reporting its there if I touch a key. once. No further response to anything but the reset button on the front of this huge tower.


Theory is its looking for brltty and will not proceed without it. So until that linkage is found and removed, I can't reboot w/o doing yet another install right now.


It has to be removed entirely before I can reboot again.

[David Wright]

Post by David Wright

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
computer just stopping and standing at that screen,

Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
or is it shutting
off? Mine shuts off.

And mine stops, period.

Adding "period" is no help. "Stop", on its own, is just so ambiguous.
What exactly stops, the process — or the computer.

In real life, we use the circumstances to decide on the meaning.
If I reported that I "stopped the car" because I saw a ball rolling
into the road, you'd assume I didn't cut the engine. If I said it
was because I saw a dust-devil barrelling down the road, you'd
assume I stopped both the car and engine.

Post by David Wright
keyboard dead after reporting its there if I touch a key. once.

Again, I have no idea what this means. None of my keyboards has
ever reported anything, to my knowledge.

Post by David Wright
No further response to anything but the reset button on the front of this huge tower.
Theory is its looking for brltty and will not proceed without it. So until that linkage is found and removed, I can't reboot w/o doing yet another install right now.
It has to be removed entirely before I can reboot again.

Ah, is this because you nuked it (whatever we understand by
the term "nuked")?

If your machine is utterly unable to avoid installing it, perhaps
you'll have to read its documentation in a little more depth and
learn how to prevent it from finding a device to talk to.

Or can you blacklist the snd modules? What do you use sound for
on this computer? Is it essential for its task, which I assume
is something to do with a lathe? Or are you still playing videos,
logging in to your bank, and machining stuff, all on the same
computer? (I realise that's a loaded question.)

Cheers,
David.

[Gene Heskett]

Post by Greg Wooledge

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Wright

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.

No idea what funkity means,

nuts, cuckoo, fubar, whacky, loopy aka abnormal

But what are the *actual* symptoms? What did Gene see? What did he
try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?
Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark, forever. I let it set there once for several hours while I caught some shuteye.

Typing /stop in my MUA shows that the line immediately above this one
contains the first occurrence of the word "stop" in this post.

Post by Greg Wooledge
Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel load line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I have to reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it. That would be a great help.

Add the string systemd.show_status=true



Added to the default grub.cfg profile, thank you


Removing quiet might get just too verbose, because I believe
you can no longer scroll back like in the olden days.



What I have reported was without the quiet argument, which I should have noted.

Cheers,
David.

Cheers Gene.

[Gene Heskett]

Post by Gene Heskett

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
That presents a detail that's not clear on Gene's case. Is the
computer just stopping and standing at that screen,

Exactly — and if it does, what's printed, and are you aware of
anything that might be missing. Or does it reboot. Or is it still
running, but writing to one of the many serial connections?

Post by Cindy Sue Causey
or is it shutting
off? Mine shuts off.

And mine stops, period.

Adding "period" is no help. "Stop", on its own, is just so ambiguous.
What exactly stops, the process — or the computer.

In real life, we use the circumstances to decide on the meaning.
If I reported that I "stopped the car" because I saw a ball rolling
into the road, you'd assume I didn't cut the engine. If I said it
was because I saw a dust-devil barrelling down the road, you'd
assume I stopped both the car and engine.

Post by Gene Heskett
keyboard dead after reporting its there if I touch a key. once.

Again, I have no idea what this means. None of my keyboards has
ever reported anything, to my knowledge.

Post by Gene Heskett
No further response to anything but the reset button on the front of this huge tower.
Theory is its looking for brltty and will not proceed without it. So until that linkage is found and removed, I can't reboot w/o doing yet another install right now.
It has to be removed entirely before I can reboot again.

Ah, is this because you nuked it (whatever we understand by
the term "nuked")?

If your machine is utterly unable to avoid installing it, perhaps
you'll have to read its documentation in a little more depth and
learn how to prevent it from finding a device to talk to.

Or can you blacklist the snd modules? What do you use sound for
on this computer? Is it essential for its task, which I assume
is something to do with a lathe? Or are you still playing videos,
logging in to your bank, and machining stuff, all on the same
computer? (I realise that's a loaded question.)

Cheers,
David.



yes. Just not all at the same time.


Since last post, I found the install logs, and BRLTTY is listed in the hardware file, as if its a mobo feature. And reading the DIY Guid from Asus, there is a tools menu where some stiff that is not list, can be controlled so the next time it forces me to reboot I will check that menu. There is not any mention of brltty in the whole 100+ pages of the book. But its listed like this in the hardware-resources file:
/proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus=0000 Vendor=0000 Product=0000 Version=0000
/proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard"
/proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11
/proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14
/proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq=
/proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=100003
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=402000007 ffc03078f800d2a9 f2beffdfffefffff fffffffffffffffe



Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in the bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY manual??? In which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet another install just to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

Hi Gene,

If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.

My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.

Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.

Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the unofficial one.

Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.

Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.

That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.

That's the counsel of perfection: alternatively:

apt rdepends brltty gives me:

***@mymachine:~$ apt rdepends brltty
brltty
Reverse Depends:
Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Suggests: orca
Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)

You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.

All the very best, as ever,

Andy Cater

[gene heskett]

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Suggests: orca
Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out?? What you are proposing
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally
have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in
the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90%
of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors. The
first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked
the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for
orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I
don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the installer
ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve
left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing
on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or
brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss
about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Felix Miata]

This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally
have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in
the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90%
of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors. The
first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked
the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for
orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I
don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the installer
ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve
left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing
on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or
brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss
about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

You did try simply disabling brltty & speech-dispatcher, right? Their enabler
appears not controlled by systemd, but by sysvinit:
/etc/init.d/brltty
/etc/init.d/speech-dispatcher

Deleting bits of what makes brltty & orca work, or removing their execute bits,
might save cpu cycles, e.g. for orca:
/etc/xdg/autostart/orca-autostart.desktop
/usr/bin/orca
/usr/bin/orca-dm-wrapper
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages-orca/orca

Maybe having the following at hand would be useful:
# apt install -d orca
Reading package lists... Done
...
After this operation, 83.0 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gsettings-desktop-schemas all 43.0-1 [643 kB]
Get:2 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 at-spi2-core amd64 2.46.0-5 [57.3 kB]
Get:3 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-atk-1.0 amd64 2.46.0-5 [23.7 kB]
Get:4 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-freedesktop amd64 1.74.0-3 [37.2 kB]
Get:5 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-atspi-2.0 amd64 2.46.0-5 [20.7 kB]
Get:6 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-gdkpixbuf-2.0 amd64 2.42.10+dfsg-1+b1 [13.5 kB]
Get:7 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-gstreamer-1.0 amd64 1.22.0-2 [105 kB]
Get:8 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-harfbuzz-0.0 amd64 6.0.0+dfsg-3 [1,579 kB]
Get:9 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libpangoxft-1.0-0 amd64 1.50.12+ds-1 [26.7 kB]
Get:10 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-pango-1.0 amd64 1.50.12+ds-1 [37.4 kB]
Get:11 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-gtk-3.0 amd64 3.24.38-2~deb12u1 [220 kB]
Get:12 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libxcb-util1 amd64 0.4.0-1+b1 [23.2 kB]
Get:13 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libstartup-notification0 amd64 0.12-6+b1 [23.1 kB]
Get:14 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libxres1 amd64 2:1.2.1-1 [19.2 kB]
Get:15 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libwnck-3-common all 43.0-3 [229 kB]
Get:16 http://www.deb-multimedia.org bookworm/main amd64 gstreamer1.0-plugins-base amd64 1.22.3-dmo1+deb12u3 [731 kB]
Get:17 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libwnck-3-0 amd64 43.0-3 [112 kB]
Get:18 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 gir1.2-wnck-3.0 amd64 43.0-3 [28.6 kB]
Get:19 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libproxy1v5 amd64 0.4.18-1.2 [56.2 kB]
Get:20 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 glib-networking-common all 2.74.0-4 [80.3 kB]
Get:21 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 glib-networking-services amd64 2.74.0-4 [12.0 kB]
Get:22 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 glib-networking amd64 2.74.0-4 [68.4 kB]
Get:23 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libvisual-0.4-0 amd64 0.4.0-19 [132 kB]
Get:24 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libvorbisidec1 amd64 1.2.1+git20180316-7 [72.3 kB]
Get:25 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libaa1 amd64 1.4p5-50 [55.7 kB]
Get:26 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libdv4 amd64 1.0.0-15 [74.4 kB]
Get:27 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libshout3 amd64 2.4.6-1+b1 [56.4 kB]
Get:28 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libtag1v5-vanilla amd64 1.13-2 [298 kB]
Get:29 http://www.deb-multimedia.org bookworm/main amd64 gstreamer1.0-plugins-good amd64 1.22.3-dmo1+deb12u1 [2,193 kB]
Get:30 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libtag1v5 amd64 1.13-2 [18.7 kB]
Get:31 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libv4lconvert0 amd64 1.22.1-5+b2 [143 kB]
Get:32 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libv4l-0 amd64 1.22.1-5+b2 [109 kB]
Get:33 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libwavpack1 amd64 5.6.0-1 [85.7 kB]
Get:34 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libsoup2.4-common all 2.74.3-1 [56.0 kB]
Get:35 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libsoup2.4-1 amd64 2.74.3-1 [269 kB]
Get:36 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libatk-adaptor amd64 2.46.0-5 [9,728 B]
Get:37 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libbrlapi0.8 amd64 6.5-7+deb12u1 [90.5 kB]
Get:38 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libdotconf0 amd64 1.3-0.3 [14.8 kB]
Get:39 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 liblouis-data all 3.24.0-1 [1,989 kB]
Get:40 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 liblouis20 amd64 3.24.0-1 [98.6 kB]
Get:41 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libspeechd2 amd64 0.11.4-2 [20.3 kB]
Get:42 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 python3-brlapi amd64 6.5-7+deb12u1 [146 kB]
Get:43 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 python3-cairo amd64 1.20.1-5+b1 [63.1 kB]
Get:44 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 python3-louis all 3.24.0-1 [23.6 kB]
Get:45 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 python3-pyatspi all 2.46.0-2 [41.9 kB]
Get:46 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 python3-xdg all 0.28-2 [40.5 kB]
Get:47 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 python3-speechd all 0.11.4-2 [43.1 kB]
Get:48 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 speech-dispatcher-audio-plugins amd64 0.11.4-2 [29.8 kB]
Get:49 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 speech-dispatcher amd64 0.11.4-2 [3,768 kB]
Get:50 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 xkbset amd64 0.6-3 [19.3 kB]
Get:51 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 orca all 43.1-1 [1,990 kB]
# apt install -d brltty
Reading package lists... Done
...
After this operation, 22.9 MB of additional disk space will be used.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
brltty libbrlapi0.8 libduktape207 liblouis-data liblouis20 libpcre2-32-0 polkitd sgml-base xml-core
0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 2,005 kB/4,183 kB of archives.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Get:1 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libpcre2-32-0 amd64 10.42-1 [234 kB]
Get:2 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 sgml-base all 1.31 [15.4 kB]
Get:3 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 xml-core all 0.18+nmu1 [23.8 kB]
Get:4 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 libduktape207 amd64 2.7.0-2 [134 kB]
Get:5 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 polkitd amd64 122-3 [112 kB]
Get:6 http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 brltty amd64 6.5-7+deb12u1 [1,486 kB]
Fetched 2,005 kB in 1s (1,936 kB/s)
#
already downloaded for orca:
libbrlapi0.8 liblouis-data liblouis20

Knowing what installs when orca and/or brltty is asked for should allow to purge
the packages obstructing your work.

[David Christensen]

https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-user%40lists.debian.org/msg779582.html

Gene Heskett Fri, 18 Feb 2022 09:14:03 -0800
<snip>
<snip>

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally
have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in
the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90%
of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The
first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked
the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for
orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I
don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the installer
ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve
left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing
on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or
brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss
about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

I suggest:

1. Back up the system configuration and data.

2. Disconnect everything internal to the chassis except for the
motherboard, power supply, front panel, fans, processor, memory, and one
disk drive for the OS connected to the first IDE, SATA, or NVMe port.

3. Disconnect everything external to the chassis except AC power, wired
keyboard, wired mouse, wired monitor, and Ethernet.

4. Boot into Setup and reset settings to factory defaults. Choose
between BIOS/Legacy and UEFI, if there is a choice. Set the disk
controller mode to AHCI. Set the clock to UTC.

5. Boot the disk manufacturer toolkit and wipe the OS drive -- secure
erase for SSD's and zero-fill for HDD's.

I seem to recall that you have a 1 TB WD Black. WD does not appear to
offer a bootable disk drive toolkit (?):

https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/downloads/softwaredownloads

If you can find a FOSS toolkit to do a secure erase, that would be best.
Alternatively, find the non-zero blocks and zero them (a good job for
a script).

6. Boot debian-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso and install Debian onto the OS
disk. I partition manually with 1 GB EFI system partition, 1 GB boot
partition, 1 GB random encrypted swap partition, and a small passphrase
encrypted root partition (twice your current root partition usage?).
Save the remaining free space for CAD, CNC, 3-D, etc., working/ scratch
files and over-provisioning, to be configured after installation. If
your desktop environment of choice is not offered by d-i, do not install
a desktop environment.

7. At the end of installation, reboot. Remove d-i media during POST.
Verify the system boots from the OS disk. Login and check vitals, but
do not change anything. Power off.

8. Boot your FOSS toolkit of choice, or d-i rescue shell, and take a
compressed image of the OS disk to a file on a USB HDD.


I use a version control system (CVS over SSH) for software development,
but also find it to be very useful for system administration.


David

[Tom Dial]

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the
installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,

I, too, am not in need of the services that brltty or orca provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.

On a bullseye system, apt-rdepends -r brltty informs me:

# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11

If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed packages other than the four listed above.

apt-rdepends -r orca tells me:

# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops

So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.

I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the "Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply" button will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant resources, however.

Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps -ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca in the first place,

I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.


Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Felix Miata]

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap.

Did the first 23 include Gnome? Did you want Gnome? Do you still use or prefer
using TDE? If the latter, then you should have no need of Gnome, or its depends on
brltty or orca.

And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the

installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

If by "destroy" you mean remove Gnome, and you'd rather be using TDE, then let it
be "destroyed".

...

So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is unacceptable to you.

I have bunches of Debian installations, all using TDE, none with brltty, orca or
gnome. I can't remember whether Gene is trying to use TDE, but it really ought to
be an answer to his trouble, unless Gnome is kept, and brltty and orca are not
neutered.

[gene heskett]

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz
and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes
firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then
re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want.
Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume
with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's
with it. Thanks Tom.

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the
fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install
insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've
done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a
second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm
blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The
delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful
when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to
announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud
enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if
I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not
reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable,
the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through
all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it
thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion
that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it
now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked
again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to
destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken
installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide, and
have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not
encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
  Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed
packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
  Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
  Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
  Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is
unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the
process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and orca),
that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a settings panel with
a check box for "Enable speech" under the "Speech" tab. Unchecking that
box and selecting the "Apply" button will silence Orca. I think that
leaves some of its subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user
task; I am far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant
resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps -ef |
grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you can kill its
parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if it is not a
necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Greg Wooledge]

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with
a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it.

"assume"

This is your fundamental problem here. Do you know what the "gnome"
package actually contains?

hobbit:~$ apt-cache show gnome
Package: gnome
Source: meta-gnome3
Version: 1:43+1
Installed-Size: 14
[...]

Installed size is 14. I'm pretty sure that's kilobytes.

"gnome" is a meta-package. Its purpose is to depend on a whole bunch
of other packages. That's all. It doesn't actually do anything by
itself.

Removing "gnome" will not remove any functionality, because "gnome" does
not *have* any functionality.

As long as you don't do an "apt-get autoremove" afterward, nothing else
will be deleted, other than what apt-get told you it was going to delete.

[gene heskett]

Post by Greg Wooledge

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with
a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it.

"assume"
This is your fundamental problem here. Do you know what the "gnome"
package actually contains?
hobbit:~$ apt-cache show gnome
Package: gnome
Source: meta-gnome3
Version: 1:43+1
Installed-Size: 14
[...]
Installed size is 14. I'm pretty sure that's kilobytes.
"gnome" is a meta-package. Its purpose is to depend on a whole bunch
of other packages. That's all. It doesn't actually do anything by
itself.
Removing "gnome" will not remove any functionality, because "gnome" does
not *have* any functionality.
As long as you don't do an "apt-get autoremove" afterward, nothing else
will be deleted, other than what apt-get told you it was going to delete.
.

autoremove is the first command of my update script. Designed to get rid
of old kernels.

But that still doesn't answer the question, How much longer till trixie
is official? I even put a ? mark on it.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Greg Wooledge]

Post by Greg Wooledge
As long as you don't do an "apt-get autoremove" afterward, nothing else
will be deleted, other than what apt-get told you it was going to delete.

autoremove is the first command of my update script. Designed to get rid of
old kernels.

Well. If that's how you want to play it, then you may need to build
a metapackage of your own using "equivs". Figure out the dependency
relationship that you want to maintain, write the control file, run
the equivs command, install the resulting .deb file.

Life is a bit simpler if you don't use autoremove. (I purge the old
kernels by hand.)

I'm still confused by your insistence on keeping GNOME installed, though.
I thought you weren't using GNOME. I thought you were using TDE.

And as far as orca goes, "gnome" depends on orca, and orca merely
suggests brltty. So, removing brltty shouldn't remove orca, and orca
should be able to function without brltty.

But that still doesn't answer the question, How much longer till trixie is
official? I even put a ? mark on it.

Sorry, my time machine is at the mechanic.

[Anssi Saari]

Post by gene heskett
But that still doesn't answer the question, How much longer till
trixie is official? I even put a ? mark on it.

About a year since bookworm is now about a year old and Debian releases
are about two years apart.

Which reminds me, I've only updated two of my six Buster systems to
Bookworm.

[Tom Dial]

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all others?

I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.

I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though, "apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency. And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would not install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome installation makes no reference at all to brltty.

Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if maybe barely possible.

Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the
installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the "Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply" button will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps -ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
.

Cheers, Gene Hes

[gene heskett]

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz
and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes
firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then
re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want.
Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all others?
I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.
I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though,
"apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency. And
on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt install
-s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would not
install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome installation
makes no reference at all to brltty.

While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent
plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and no
wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves this
house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard. Wasn't
that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that, hard enough
to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were months
healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or computer, but I
did get the message. I've had many strikes on that pole since I built a
garage on the end of the house, which caused me to install a 200 amp
service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC. Zero problems since then
(2008)

Post by Tom Dial
Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know whether
that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if maybe barely
possible.
Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in
the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the
install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o
asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from
wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me
because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the
computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do
work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5
yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke
or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first
23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked
the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for
orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and
I don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the
installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have
only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another
install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on
removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with
synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the
system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is
"won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide,
and have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I
have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any
installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is
unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the
process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and
orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a settings
panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the "Speech" tab.
Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply" button will silence
Orca. I think that leaves some of its subtasks running, as children
of the systemd --user task; I am far from expert here. They do not
seem to use significant resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps
-ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you can
kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if it is
not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca in the
first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Thank you Tom

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Tom Dial]

Post by Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all others?
I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.
I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though, "apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency. And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would not install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome installation makes no reference at all to brltty.

While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard. Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that, hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were months healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or computer, but I did get the message. I've had many strikes on that pole since I built a garage on the end of the house, which caused me to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC. Zero problems since then (2008)

Post by Tom Dial
Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if maybe barely possible.
Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line package management program since buster or earlier. I have never had to install it. You probably should if it is missing.

apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r <package-name>", and "apt rdepends <package-name>" both show reverse dependencies of <package-name>; the latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest <package name, I think).
If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.

Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through all that again. Until the
installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the "Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply" button will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps -ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Thank you Tom

[gene heskett]

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using
tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that
includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all.
Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you
want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all others?
I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.
I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though,
"apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency.
And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt
install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would
not install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome
installation makes no reference at all to brltty.

While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent
plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and
no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves
this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard.
Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that,
hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were
months healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or
computer, but I did get the message. I've had many strikes on that
pole since I built a garage on the end of the house, which caused me
to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC.
Zero problems since then (2008)

Post by Tom Dial
Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know
whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if
maybe barely possible.
Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by
default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line package
management program since buster or earlier. I have never had to install
it. You probably should if it is missing.
apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r <package-name>", and "apt rdepends
<package-name>" both show reverse dependencies of <package-name>; the
latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest <package name, I
think).
If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.

I was not aware that apt had that talent built it, thank you.

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in
the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the
install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o
asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from
wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me
because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the
computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do
work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5
yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the
neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that
crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but
hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the
installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through
all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because
it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the
suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it.
Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either
orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get
when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca
provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time,
although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any
installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is
unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the
process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and
orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a
settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the
"Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply" button
will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its subtasks
running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am far from
expert here. They do not seem to use significant resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps
-ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you
can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if
it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca
in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Thank you Tom
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[gene heskett]

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using
tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that
includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all.
Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you
want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all others?
I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.
I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though,
"apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency.
And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt
install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would
not install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome
installation makes no reference at all to brltty.

While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent
plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and
no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves
this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard.
Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that,
hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were
months healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or
computer, but I did get the message. I've had many strikes on that
pole since I built a garage on the end of the house, which caused me
to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC.
Zero problems since then (2008)

Post by Tom Dial
Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know
whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if
maybe barely possible.
Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by
default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line package
management program since buster or earlier. I have never had to install
it. You probably should if it is missing.
apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r <package-name>", and "apt rdepends
<package-name>" both show reverse dependencies of <package-name>; the
latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest <package name, I
think).
If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in
the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the
install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o
asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from
wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me
because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the
computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do
work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5
yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every
keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the
neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that
crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but
hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the
installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through
all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because
it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the
suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it.
Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every
dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either
orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get
when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca
provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time,
although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any
installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is
unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the
process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and
orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a
settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the
"Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply" button
will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its subtasks
running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am far from
expert here. They do not seem to use significant resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps
-ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you
can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if
it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca
in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Thank you Tom
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two
orca's. one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't
use. Typing orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several
minutes but comes back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was
being executed. Whatevver, the installation is quite voluminous:
***@coyote:~/AppImages$ locate orca |wc -l
1560

So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.

No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Greg Wooledge]

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two orca's.
one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't use.

Oh! That sounds super relevant.

If you're not using the second one, where did it come from? If it's
interfering with your desktop environment, but you're not using it,
maybe you can get rid of it.

That would be one solution path to explore. The other... you're already
exploring, so see below.

Typing
orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several minutes but comes
back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was being executed.

"type orca" will tell you what the shell has chosen.

"type -a orca" will tell you all the places the shell sees it, in order.

So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies will
put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove.

Install "equivs". Read its documentation. Read it a second time,
because it's probably too subtle to get all at once.

Pick one of the example templates (mail-transport-agent is the smallest,
so I'd use that one), make a copy of it, and modify the copy. Get rid of
the Provides and Conflicts, and replace them with a Depends: line that's
identical to the one from "gnome", except get rid of orca. Change the
Package name and the Description to be something meaningful to you.

I'd suggest the name gene-gnome because it's a fun pun.

Build your new .deb which depends on all the parts of GNOME except for
orca. Install it with dpkg -i.

Since the gnome Depends: line has versioned dependencies, your custom
replacement probably won't survive a dist-upgrade, so be prepared to
undo and redo this hack when you upgrade to a new version of Debian.

[gene heskett]

Post by Greg Wooledge

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two orca's.
one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't use.

Oh! That sounds super relevant.

I forgot to mention the speech synth is "orca", the slicer is "Orca"

Post by Greg Wooledge
If you're not using the second one, where did it come from? If it's
interfering with your desktop environment, but you're not using it,
maybe you can get rid of it.

An AppImage, rm it.

Post by Greg Wooledge
That would be one solution path to explore. The other... you're already
exploring, so see below.

Typing
orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several minutes but comes
back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was being executed.

"type orca" will tell you what the shell has chosen.
"type -a orca" will tell you all the places the shell sees it, in order.

So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies will
put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove.

Install "equivs". Read its documentation. Read it a second time,
because it's probably too subtle to get all at once.
Pick one of the example templates (mail-transport-agent is the smallest,
so I'd use that one), make a copy of it, and modify the copy. Get rid of
the Provides and Conflicts, and replace them with a Depends: line that's
identical to the one from "gnome", except get rid of orca. Change the
Package name and the Description to be something meaningful to you.
I'd suggest the name gene-gnome because it's a fun pun.
Build your new .deb which depends on all the parts of GNOME except for
orca. Install it with dpkg -i.
Since the gnome Depends: line has versioned dependencies, your custom
replacement probably won't survive a dist-upgrade, so be prepared to
undo and redo this hack when you upgrade to a new version of Debian.
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[gene heskett]

Post by Greg Wooledge

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two orca's.
one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't use.

Oh! That sounds super relevant.
If you're not using the second one, where did it come from? If it's
interfering with your desktop environment, but you're not using it,
maybe you can get rid of it.
That would be one solution path to explore. The other... you're already
exploring, so see below.

Typing
orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several minutes but comes
back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was being executed.

"type orca" will tell you what the shell has chosen.
"type -a orca" will tell you all the places the shell sees it, in order.

So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies will
put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove.

Install "equivs". Read its documentation. Read it a second time,
because it's probably too subtle to get all at once.

Where are the docs, it doesn't come with a manpage? Buried someplace in
/usr/share/docs? Found it, instructs are in the README-Debian file but
quite sparse. Looks like it could work however. Needs more
coffee...Lots more.

Thanks.

Post by Greg Wooledge
Pick one of the example templates (mail-transport-agent is the smallest,
so I'd use that one), make a copy of it, and modify the copy. Get rid of
the Provides and Conflicts, and replace them with a Depends: line that's
identical to the one from "gnome", except get rid of orca. Change the
Package name and the Description to be something meaningful to you.
I'd suggest the name gene-gnome because it's a fun pun.

Interesting. and something I've not tried on x86-64 machines. I do build
stuff on the arm64, but this looks different from making a buildbot or
rt kernel.

Post by Greg Wooledge
Build your new .deb which depends on all the parts of GNOME except for
orca. Install it with dpkg -i.
Since the gnome Depends: line has versioned dependencies, your custom
replacement probably won't survive a dist-upgrade, so be prepared to
undo and redo this hack when you upgrade to a new version of Debian.

Noted but short term memory will probably fail.

Thank you Greg.

Post by Greg Wooledge
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[gene heskett]

Post by gene heskett
So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.

I delayed logging in after starting the PC some time ago when a voice
boomed out the keys I was typing.
"What the.."
Reading this thread I purged orca and brltty on trixie and everything
still seems to be working.
mick
.

Where did you get that beta trixie installer? bookworm does not allow
that removal of orca without also removing gnome. brltty yes, but not orca.

Thanks mick.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[gene heskett]

Post by gene heskett
Where did you get that beta trixie installer? bookworm does not allow
that removal of orca without also removing gnome. brltty yes, but not orca.

I don't think I've got any gnome stuff.
here probably.
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-dvd/
mick
.

Got it, thanks mick.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[David Christensen]

Post by gene heskett
In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two
orca's. one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't
use. Typing orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several
minutes but comes back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was
1560
So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.
No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

Here are my installation notes from when I migrated my daily driver from
Debian 9 to Debian 11. It has orca, and orca has never bothered me:

January 9, 2022

1. Wipe Intel SSD 520 Series 60 GB drive in Intel DQ67SW. Insert
debian-11.2.0-amd64-netinst USB flash drive into USB 3.0 port
adjacent Gigabit port. Boot:

Debian GNU/Linux installer menu (BIOS mode)
install
Language C
Continent or region North America
Country, territory or area United States
Keymap to use American English
Hostname laalaa
Domain name tracy.holgerdanske.com
Root password ********
Re-enter password ********
Full name for new user debian
Username for your account debian
Choose a password ********
Re-enter password ********
Select your time zone Pacific
Partitioning method Manual
Select a partition... SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 60.0 GB ATA INTEL SSDSC2CW06
Create partition table Yes
Select a partition... pri/log 60.0 GB FREE SPACE
Create a new partition
New partition size 1 GB
Type Primary
Location Beginning
Partition settings
Use as Ext4 journaling file system
Mount point /boot
Mount options defaults
Label laalaa_boot
Reserved blocks 5%
Typical usage standard
Bootable flag on
Done setting up the partition
Select a partition... pri/log 59.0 GB FREE SPACE
Create a new partition
New partition size 1 GB
Type Primary
Location Beginning
Partition settings
Use as physical volume for encryption
Encryption method Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
Encryption aes
Key size 256
IV algorithm xts-plain64
Encryption key Random key
Erase data no
Bootable flag off
Done setting up the partition
Select a partition... pri/log 58.0 GB FREE SPACE
Create a new partition
New partition size 13 GB
Type Primary
Location Beginning
Partition settings
Use as physical volume for encryption
Encryption method Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
Encryption aes
Key size 256
IV algorithm xts-plain64
Encryption key Passphrase
Erase data no
Bootable flag off
Done setting up the partition
Configure encrypted volumes
Write the changes to disk Yes
Encryption configuration Create encrypted volumes
Devices to encrypt
[*] /dev/sda2 (1000MB; crypto)
[*] /dev/sda3 (13000MB; crypt)
Continue
Encryption configuration Finish
Encryption passphrase ********
Re-enter passphrase ********
Select a partition... #1 13.0 GB f ext4
Partition settings
Use as Ext4 journaling file system
Mount point /
Mount options defaults
Label laalaa_root
Reserved blocks 5%
Typical usage standard
Done setting up the partition
Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
Write the changes to disks Yes
Debian archive mirror country United States
Debian archive mirror deb.debian.org
HTTP proxy information <blank>
Package usage survey No
Choose software Debian desktop environment
Xfce
SSH server
standard system utiilties
Device for boot loader installation
/dev/sdb (ata-INTEL_SSDSC2CW060A3_********)
Installation complete Continue

Push and hold power button at POST; release when computer turns
off. Remove USB flash drive.

2. Take image:
<snip>


I may have installed only once in the past 2 years, ~4 months, but I
have blown up that computer many times. The key is defense in depth --
OS configuration files and data working directories in a networked
version control system (CVS) with the repository on another computer, OS
disk images, OS and data backups, IMAP backups of incoming and outgoing
messages, etc..


Did you ever build that dedicated backup server? I recall you buying a
bunch of 2 TB 2.5" SATA SSD's for crazy cheap that turned out to be
counterfeit, but do not recall any news since then.


David

[gene heskett]

Post by David Christensen

Post by gene heskett
In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two
orca's. one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't
use. Typing orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several
minutes but comes back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was
1560
So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.
No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

Here are my installation notes from when I migrated my daily driver from
January 9, 2022
1.  Wipe Intel SSD 520 Series 60 GB drive in Intel DQ67SW.  Insert
    debian-11.2.0-amd64-netinst USB flash drive into USB 3.0 port
    Debian GNU/Linux installer menu (BIOS mode)
                    install
    Language            C
    Continent or region        North America
    Country, territory or area    United States
    Keymap to use            American English
    Hostname            laalaa
    Domain name            tracy.holgerdanske.com
    Root password            ********
    Re-enter password        ********
    Full name for new user        debian
    Username for your account    debian
    Choose a password        ********
    Re-enter password        ********
    Select your time zone        Pacific
    Partitioning method        Manual
      Select a partition...    SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 60.0 GB ATA INTEL
SSDSC2CW06
        Create partition table    Yes
      Select a partition...        pri/log 60.0 GB FREE SPACE
        Create a new partition
          New partition size    1 GB
          Type            Primary
          Location            Beginning
          Partition settings
        Use as            Ext4 journaling file system
        Mount point        /boot
        Mount options        defaults
        Label            laalaa_boot
        Reserved blocks        5%
        Typical usage        standard
        Bootable flag        on
        Done setting up the partition
      Select a partition...        pri/log 59.0 GB FREE SPACE
        Create a new partition
          New partition size    1 GB
          Type            Primary
          Location            Beginning
          Partition settings
        Use as            physical volume for encryption
        Encryption method    Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
        Encryption        aes
        Key size        256
        IV algorithm        xts-plain64
        Encryption key        Random key
        Erase data        no
        Bootable flag        off
        Done setting up the partition
      Select a partition...        pri/log 58.0 GB FREE SPACE
        Create a new partition
          New partition size    13 GB
          Type            Primary
          Location            Beginning
          Partition settings
        Use as            physical volume for encryption
        Encryption method    Device-mapper (dm-crypt)
        Encryption        aes
        Key size        256
        IV algorithm        xts-plain64
        Encryption key        Passphrase
        Erase data        no
        Bootable flag        off
        Done setting up the partition
      Configure encrypted volumes
        Write the changes to disk    Yes
        Encryption configuration    Create encrypted volumes
        Devices to encrypt
          [*] /dev/sda2 (1000MB; crypto)
          [*] /dev/sda3 (13000MB; crypt)
        Continue
        Encryption configuration    Finish
        Encryption passphrase    ********
        Re-enter passphrase        ********
      Select a partition...        #1 13.0 GB f ext4
        Partition settings
          Use as            Ext4 journaling file system
          Mount point        /
          Mount options        defaults
          Label            laalaa_root
          Reserved blocks        5%
          Typical usage        standard
          Done setting up the partition
      Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
        Write the changes to disks    Yes
    Debian archive mirror country    United States
    Debian archive mirror        deb.debian.org
    HTTP proxy information        <blank>
    Package usage survey        No
    Choose software            Debian desktop environment
                        Xfce
                    SSH server
                    standard system utiilties
    Device for boot loader installation
                    /dev/sdb (ata-INTEL_SSDSC2CW060A3_********)
    Installation complete        Continue
    Push and hold power button at POST; release when computer turns
    off.  Remove USB flash drive.
<snip>
I may have installed only once in the past 2 years, ~4 months, but I
have blown up that computer many times.  The key is defense in depth --
OS configuration files and data working directories in a networked
version control system (CVS) with the repository on another computer, OS
disk images, OS and data backups, IMAP backups of incoming and outgoing
messages, etc..
Did you ever build that dedicated backup server?  I recall you buying a
bunch of 2 TB 2.5" SATA SSD's for crazy cheap that turned out to be
counterfeit, but do not recall any news since then.

Those IIRC got stored in the round file, and I bought a big pile of 2T
gigastones that were good. The raid10 and all it samsung 870 1T drives
is still working despite 2 of the 4 samsungs reporting lots of errors,
its been rsynced to one of the gigastones and fstab adjusted to make it
/home. That had zero effect on the 30 second or more lockup opening a
gfx file for editing. But I've had 3d printer problems in wholesale
qty's, so no actual progress on the pi cloned backup server has been
made. The 3d printer probs are preventing the launch of a small
business because of the delays in making product.>

Post by David Christensen
David

Thanks David.

Post by David Christensen
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[gene heskett]

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a
mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get
you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on.
Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using
tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that
includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can.
Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there,
since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all.
Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system
you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate
action from all others?
I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.
I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them,
though, "apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome
dependency. And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of
gnome ("apt install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package
only and would not install it along with gnome; on the stretch
system, gnome installation makes no reference at all to brltty.

While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and
rodent plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired
keyboard and no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the
pole that serves this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers
on the keyboard. Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot
harder that that, hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles
and the burns were months healing. And in this case did not damage
the keyboard or computer, but I did get the message. I've had many
strikes on that pole since I built a garage on the end of the house,
which caused me to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding
specs up to NEC. Zero problems since then (2008)

Post by Tom Dial
Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove
brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know
whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if
maybe barely possible.
Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt
purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by
default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line
package management program since buster or earlier. I have never had
to install it. You probably should if it is missing.
apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r <package-name>", and "apt rdepends
<package-name>" both show reverse dependencies of <package-name>; the
latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest <package name, I
think).
If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons
in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me
because the install insists on installing and configuring orca
and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to
stop it from wasting about a second while its yelling every
keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca
disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in
the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is
using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce
and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough
to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if
I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it
would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I
have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want
to have to go through all that again. Until the installer ASKS
me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one
nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install,
is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on
removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with
synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy
the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer
is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca
provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time,
although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any
installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is
unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find
the process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and
orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a
settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the
"Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply"
button will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its
subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am
far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant
resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with
"ps -ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or
you can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef
output) if it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to
not start orca in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Thank you Tom
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two
orca's. one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I don't
use. Typing orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for several
minutes but comes back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC which was
1560

The output of "which orca" would have told you the path to the orca
program you ran. The orca program (Python script) that Debian installs
with gnome is /usr/bin/orca.
With the orca that Debian installs along with gnome, typing "orca" in a
command line and hitting the <Enter> key starts orca in its working
mode. To get the GUI settings panel, you have to use "orca -s". See the
orca man page for setup details.
orca's normal run mode is in the background with no screen presence

Post by gene heskett
So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies
will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time
this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.

It appears you had more than one orca, different programs and for
different, unrelated purposes. Debian installed only one of them. The
other, hinted by the directory in which you ran the locate command,
presumably was installed by you, and may be part of an AppImage. Or
maybe it is the same orca, but installed with an appimage. I don't use
AppImage packages knowingly, and only use non-distribution packages very
sparingly, so have little to contribute on that subject.

I OTOH, have found AppImages a good way to get uptodate, and keep
uptodate, packages like OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and the miriad 3d slicers,
most of which do a new AppImage in the first week of the month. So the
OpenSCAD I'm running is nearly 4 years newer than the repo version, and
probably 20x faster.

You stated above that the "other" - non-Debian - orca was for 3D
printers you don't use. That suggests you could remove it without
interfering with anything.

It was an AppImage, rm-able.

But you removed orca - the Debian-installed one - and just as apt (or
apt-get) said when you did it, it removed gnome. And the result was
unsatisfactory, as I said it probably would be in an earlier message on
this thread.
The obvious solution is remove the other - non-Debian - Orca, note uppercase with
whatever tools are appropriate to that. Then reinstall gnome. As you
said, that will reinstall orca as a dependency. But once it is done, you
can tune orca - the Debian one - to be less obtrusive, or even silent,
in the way I described earlier.
If, for reasons, you can't remove the non-Debian orca, it might not even
matter, since it silencing the Debian one is pretty easy

That I did not find easy. Disabling it also removes the ability to
reboot as the boot hangs forever waiting for orca to start, quite early
in the boot. That little detail is responsible for the first 23
re-installs.
.

Regards,
Tom Dial

Thanks Tom.

No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[David Christensen]

Post by gene heskett
I OTOH, have found AppImages a good way to get uptodate, and keep
uptodate, packages like OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and the miriad 3d slicers,
most of which do a new AppImage in the first week of the month. So the
OpenSCAD I'm running is nearly 4 years newer than the repo version, and
probably 20x faster.

I have found that installing software on Debian by any means other than
official Debian packages is a recipe for disaster.


I sometimes write Perl code that runs as root. I use VirtualBox and do
my development and testing on virtual machines. Oracle provides Debian
packages and integrates with sources.list(5) and apt-get(8). See
"Debian-based Linux distributions":

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads


If you installed VirtualBox on your Debian primary workstation, you
could create one Debian VM for each of your engineering/ manufacturing
apps. This would give each app a clean Debian VM for installation,
prevent apps from fighting each other, and prevent apps from modifying
your base Debian installation.


David

[gene heskett]

Post by David Christensen

Post by gene heskett
I OTOH, have found AppImages a good way to get uptodate, and keep
uptodate, packages like OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and the miriad 3d slicers,
most of which do a new AppImage in the first week of the month. So the
OpenSCAD I'm running is nearly 4 years newer than the repo version,
and probably 20x faster.

I have found that installing software on Debian by any means other than
official Debian packages is a recipe for disaster.
I sometimes write Perl code that runs as root.  I use VirtualBox and do
my development and testing on virtual machines.  Oracle provides Debian
packages and integrates with sources.list(5) and apt-get(8).  See
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads
If you installed VirtualBox on your Debian primary workstation, you
could create one Debian VM for each of your engineering/ manufacturing
apps.  This would give each app a clean Debian VM for installation,
prevent apps from fighting each other, and prevent apps from modifying
your base Debian installation.
David

It is quite rare that a snap, appimage, or venv needs anything from the
system. Memory or storage is generally done at whatever venv is started
as the user. That venv equ is generally what they all claim to do. I see
your reticence to make use of them as a restriction.

Post by David Christensen
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[David Christensen]

Post by gene heskett

Post by David Christensen
If you installed VirtualBox on your Debian primary workstation, you
could create one Debian VM for each of your engineering/ manufacturing
apps.  This would give each app a clean Debian VM for installation,
prevent apps from fighting each other, and prevent apps from modifying
your base Debian installation.

It is quite rare that a snap, appimage, or venv needs anything from the
system. Memory or storage is generally done at whatever venv is started
as the user. That venv equ is generally what they all claim to do. I see
your reticence to make use of them as a restriction.

My suggestion is a variation of the "divide and conquer" troubleshooting
strategy.


I am not familiar with snap, appimage, or venv. Regardless of the
software distribution mechanism, I expect that each app is developed and
tested against a list of supported OS's and releases using VM's. If you
provide each app with its own VM containing a supported OS and release,
the app should install and work correctly. And, your base Debian
installation should remain stable.


David

[gene heskett]

Post by David Christensen

Post by gene heskett

Post by David Christensen
If you installed VirtualBox on your Debian primary workstation, you
could create one Debian VM for each of your engineering/
manufacturing apps.  This would give each app a clean Debian VM for
installation, prevent apps from fighting each other, and prevent apps
from modifying your base Debian installation.

It is quite rare that a snap, appimage, or venv needs anything from
the system. Memory or storage is generally done at whatever venv is
started as the user. That venv equ is generally what they all claim to
do. I see your reticence to make use of them as a restriction.

My suggestion is a variation of the "divide and conquer" troubleshooting
strategy.
I am not familiar with snap, appimage, or venv.  Regardless of the
software distribution mechanism, I expect that each app is developed and
tested against a list of supported OS's and releases using VM's.  If you
provide each app with its own VM containing a supported OS and release,
the app should install and work correctly.  And, your base Debian
installation should remain stable.

That it is not, locking up about every 10 days switching workspaces,
locking with what would be horizontal synch bar in an NTSC system,
frozen at some random location on the screen. Mouse pointer is alive and
moves with the mouse, but buttons are inactive, Cycle the power or press
the front panel reset for 4+ seconds to reboot. I've also asked about
that several times, without a reply. Memtest86, V9.4 says my 32Gigs is
clean. Video is built into the mainboard, Intel of some sort I believe.
Compared to the other problem I have, fixing this is not a very high
priority. But I need sleep, so good night. Take care & stay well, David.>

Post by David Christensen
David
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[t***@tuxteam.de]

On Sat, Jun 08, 2024 at 03:13:21PM -0400, gene heskett wrote:

[...]

[...] That venv equ is generally what they all claim to do. I see your
reticence to make use of them as a restriction.

I'm also firmly in that restricted camp.

One of the things I appreciate distributions (and Debian in particular)
is that they are a kind of "contract" (in Debian, it's even stated
explicitly with the Social Contract).

Things are packaged in a specific way, there are some principles the
distro tries to follow, etc.

So this makes things easier for you, the user. Less surprises.

Snaps, AppImages, etc. just "use" [1] this social construct as an
infrastructure and bring their world with them -- without even trying
to mesh, let alone to give back.

That's why I tend to stay away from them.

Don't get me wrong: on a technical level they are cute (and have been
reinvented time and again, the first I know of is Tcl's starkit, around
2002), and they have their uses, but as a distribution model I avoid
them for social reasons.

Cheers

[1] I have a significantly harsher term for that, but I'm trying hard
to stay polite.

[gene heskett]

Post by gene heskett

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a
mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power
down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder
cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back
to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get
you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on.
Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does -
if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using
tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that
includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you
can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there,
since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all.
Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system
you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those
packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all
get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember
where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I
assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its
dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate
action from all others?
I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this
discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.
I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch
installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them,
though, "apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome
dependency. And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation
of gnome ("apt install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested
package only and would not install it along with gnome; on the
stretch system, gnome installation makes no reference at all to
brltty.

While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and
rodent plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired
keyboard and no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the
pole that serves this house reach up and tap me by way of my
fingers on the keyboard. Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been
tapped a lot harder that that, hard enough to trigger a 6 month
round of shingles and the burns were months healing. And in this
case did not damage the keyboard or computer, but I did get the
message. I've had many strikes on that pole since I built a garage
on the end of the house, which caused me to install a 200 amp
service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC. Zero problems
since then (2008)

Post by Tom Dial
Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in
suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to
remove brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives
to know whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far
fetched if maybe barely possible.
Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and
"apt purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by
default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line
package management program since buster or earlier. I have never
had to install it. You probably should if it is missing.
apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r <package-name>", and "apt rdepends
<package-name>" both show reverse dependencies of <package-name>;
the latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest <package
name, I think).
If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and
say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other
irons in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for
me because the install insists on installing and configuring
orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now,
trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I
finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The
delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not
useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me
loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse
motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23
installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you
nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever
waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer
AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through all
that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because
it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the
suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it.
Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and
every dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing
either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet
all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't
fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca
provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time,
although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any
installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is
unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find
the process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome
and orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a
settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the
"Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply"
button will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its
subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am
far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant
resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with
"ps -ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough.
Or you can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef
output) if it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to
not start orca in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Thank you Tom
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

In experimenting I've found a name clash, there are appprently two
orca's. one is a speech synth, one is a slicer for 3d printers I
don't use. Typing orca in a shell locks the shell wo any output, for
several minutes but comes back to a prompt with a ctl-c, so I've NDC
which was being executed. Whatevver, the installation is quite
1560

The output of "which orca" would have told you the path to the orca
program you ran. The orca program (Python script) that Debian
installs with gnome is /usr/bin/orca.
With the orca that Debian installs along with gnome, typing "orca" in
a command line and hitting the <Enter> key starts orca in its working
mode. To get the GUI settings panel, you have to use "orca -s". See
the orca man page for setup details.
orca's normal run mode is in the background with no screen presence

Post by gene heskett
So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes
dependencies will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove.
So one more time this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a
rear.

It appears you had more than one orca, different programs and for
different, unrelated purposes. Debian installed only one of them. The
other, hinted by the directory in which you ran the locate command,
presumably was installed by you, and may be part of an AppImage. Or
maybe it is the same orca, but installed with an appimage. I don't
use AppImage packages knowingly, and only use non-distribution
packages very sparingly, so have little to contribute on that subject.

I OTOH, have found AppImages a good way to get uptodate, and keep
uptodate, packages like OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and the miriad 3d slicers,
most of which do a new AppImage in the first week of the month. So the
OpenSCAD I'm running is nearly 4 years newer than the repo version,
and probably 20x faster.

You stated above that the "other" - non-Debian - orca was for 3D
printers you don't use. That suggests you could remove it without
interfering with anything.

It was an AppImage, rm-able.ff>

But you removed orca - the Debian-installed one - and just as apt (or
apt-get) said when you did it, it removed gnome. And the result was
unsatisfactory, as I said it probably would be in an earlier message
on this thread.
The obvious solution is remove the other - non-Debian - Orca, note
uppercase with whatever tools are appropriate to that. Then reinstall
gnome. As you said, that will reinstall orca as a dependency. But
once it is done, you can tune orca - the Debian one - to be less
obtrusive, or even silent, in the way I described earlier.
If, for reasons, you can't remove the non-Debian orca, it might not
even matter, since it silencing the Debian one is pretty easy

That I did not find easy. Disabling it also removes the ability to
reboot as the boot hangs forever waiting for orca to start, quite
early in the boot.  That little detail is responsible for the first 23
re-installs.

I don't oppose appimage use, except on a sort of vague esthetic basis or
misplaced/unnecessary concern with resource use "efficiency." They
certainly have valid use cases.
Restore the system to the point where it has the software installed that
you want, plus gnome, plus the orca that came with gnome. Make sure
brltty is gone, since you don't want it.
    apt purge brltty --yes
Reboot.
(Probably unnecessary, but it won't hurt and will ensure the system is
in a fairly normal state).
    orca -s &
In 5 - 10 seconds, the "Screen Reader Preferences" panel should be
displayed, with 8 tabs under the title. Left-click the "Speech" tab and
make sure the "Enable speech" box is unchecked. Then left-click the
"Apply" button at the bottom of the panel, and after that the "OK"
button. The preferences panel will close in a few seconds.
Orca should no longer read screens. And the change should be persistent
across logins and reboots: the settings are saved in your
~/.local/share/orca/ for later.

orca is gone, as is gnome. Apt and synaptic refuse to re-install gnome
w/o dragging in orca too. Good night, whats left of it, Tom.

You also could take care of orca for the current session by
    killall orca
but it would not be persistent across logins.
Also see
    https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/commands_speech_settings.html.en
    man orca
    /usr/share/doc/orca/README
I won't say it's the best documentation I have seen, but it is
documentation, and better than some.
Regards,
Tom

Post by gene heskett
.

Regards,
Tom Dial

Thanks Tom.
No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

Post by gene heskett

    man orca
    /usr/share/doc/orca/README
I won't say it's the best documentation I have seen, but it is
documentation, and better than some.
Regards,
Tom

.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--

Gene,

Any chance you could cut down extra stuff in the messages?

This was a *very* long message.

At this point, your best option is actually to rebuild, I think.

You can find a .iso file at https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/debian-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso

Unplug extraneous USB leads except for a mouse or keyboard.

When you boot it up - go for the text mode expert install immediately you
hear the two beeps. If you don't hear the beeps, don't hang around.

Set up your IP address and hostname explicitly so that you know they
will be reflected when you reboot.

Do NOT install any desktop environment if you want to continue using
TDE. That way you won't install GNOME or orca or anything else.

Reboot - then go from there to install TDE.

There's a sunk cost fallacy - you've invested a bunch of time and effort
but you have an unusable machine. To make it usable, you might well need
to strip it to bare bones and continue from there.

None of us can help you - we don't know what you may have done. Crucially,
_you_ don't know what you may have done and can't / won't take our advice
on how to disable orca
All best, as ever,

Andy
(***@debian.org)

[Greg Wooledge]

orca is gone, as is gnome. Apt and synaptic refuse to re-install gnome w/o
dragging in orca too. Good night, whats left of it, Tom.

The "gnome" metapackage depends on "orca". It's a direct dependency.

hobbit:~$ apt-cache show gnome | grep Depends:
Depends: gnome-core (= 1:43+1), desktop-base, libproxy1-plugin-networkmanager, network-manager-gnome (>= 1.8), cheese (>= 3.38), file-roller (>= 3.38), gnome-calendar (>= 3.38), gnome-clocks (>= 3.38), gnome-color-manager (>= 3.36), gnome-maps (>= 3.38), gnome-music (>= 3.36), shotwell | gnome-photos (>= 3.36), gnome-weather (>= 3.36), orca (>= 3.38), rygel-playbin (>= 0.36), rygel-tracker (>= 0.36), simple-scan (>= 3.36), avahi-daemon, evolution (>= 3.36), gnome-sound-recorder, gnome-tweaks (>= 3.30), libgsf-bin, libreoffice-gnome, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, libreoffice-impress, rhythmbox (>= 3.0), seahorse (>= 3.36), xdg-user-dirs-gtk, cups-pk-helper (>= 0.2), evolution-plugins (>= 3.36), gstreamer1.0-libav (>= 1.10), gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly (>= 1.10), rhythmbox-plugins, rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder, totem-plugins

hobbit:~$ apt-cache show gnome | grep Depends: | grep -oP 'orca.*?,'
orca (>= 3.38),

I've spelled out for you step by step how to build your own replacement
for "gnome" which lacks this dependency. You've ignored that.

Others have suggested steps for disabling/reconfiguring orca without
removing it. You haven't tried that path either.

You just keep repeating the same steps over and over and expecting a
different result.

[gene heskett]

Post by Greg Wooledge

orca is gone, as is gnome. Apt and synaptic refuse to re-install gnome w/o
dragging in orca too. Good night, whats left of it, Tom.

The "gnome" metapackage depends on "orca". It's a direct dependency.
Depends: gnome-core (= 1:43+1), desktop-base, libproxy1-plugin-networkmanager, network-manager-gnome (>= 1.8), cheese (>= 3.38), file-roller (>= 3.38), gnome-calendar (>= 3.38), gnome-clocks (>= 3.38), gnome-color-manager (>= 3.36), gnome-maps (>= 3.38), gnome-music (>= 3.36), shotwell | gnome-photos (>= 3.36), gnome-weather (>= 3.36), orca (>= 3.38), rygel-playbin (>= 0.36), rygel-tracker (>= 0.36), simple-scan (>= 3.36), avahi-daemon, evolution (>= 3.36), gnome-sound-recorder, gnome-tweaks (>= 3.30), libgsf-bin, libreoffice-gnome, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, libreoffice-impress, rhythmbox (>= 3.0), seahorse (>= 3.36), xdg-user-dirs-gtk, cups-pk-helper (>= 0.2), evolution-plugins (>= 3.36), gstreamer1.0-libav (>= 1.10), gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly (>= 1.10), rhythmbox-plugins, rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder, totem-plugins

So I ran the above apt-cache show, writing it to /tmp/gnome-deps, then
removed orca from that list and saved it over itself.

I am freshly rebooted, nothing is running but this tbird and ntpsec as
this machine is a stratum 3 server to most of the other machines here.
I have a few bash's running but no local network has been started so the
system is relatively clean.

So I have a comma separated list of deps w/o orca, in /tmp/gnome-deps.
whats next?

Post by Greg Wooledge
hobbit:~$ apt-cache show gnome | grep Depends: | grep -oP 'orca.*?,'
orca (>= 3.38),
I've spelled out for you step by step how to build your own replacement
for "gnome" which lacks this dependency. You've ignored that.

Not totally, but studying the equiv docs (the README) is leaving me
puzzled. Your list above, leaving out orca looks like a good starting
point but is a lot of typing. I just had a lockup & had a 30 second lag
like launching shotwell gives before the reset button even cleared the
screen to start the reboot.

Post by Greg Wooledge
Others have suggested steps for disabling/reconfiguring orca without
removing it. You haven't tried that path either.

That I finally figured out 9 months or so back up the log, so I didn't
pursue it further.

Post by Greg Wooledge
You just keep repeating the same steps over and over and expecting a
different result.
.

Thanks Greg.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Tom Dial]

Post by Tom Dial

Post by Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want. Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.

Any attempt to remove cura or brltty, removes gnome leaving me I assume with a text only system by the time gnome takes all its dependency's with it.  Thanks Tom.

Have you actually tried uninstalling brltty only, as a separate action from all others?
I have a number of gnome installations, unfortunately for this discussion all bookworm. None of them has brltty.
I have a few installations of bullseye and an older stretch installation, but none with gnome installed. On all of them, though, "apt-rdepends -r gnome" fails to list brltty as a gnome dependency. And on the bookworm systems, simulated installation of gnome ("apt install -s gnome") shows brltty as a suggested package only and would not install it along with gnome; on the stretch system, gnome installation makes no reference at all to brltty.

While I have both with only the radio buttons for keyboard and rodent plugged into usb at install time. I have only one wired keyboard and no wired mice as I've had a lightning strike on the pole that serves this house reach up and tap me by way of my fingers on the keyboard. Wasn't that much of a tap, I've been tapped a lot harder that that, hard enough to trigger a 6 month round of shingles and the burns were months healing. And in this case did not damage the keyboard or computer, but I did get the message. I've had many strikes on that pole since I built a garage on the end of the house, which caused me to install a 200 amp service and bring my grounding specs up to NEC. Zero problems since then (2008)

Post by Tom Dial
Is it possible you have apt settings that automatically pull in suggested packages, and that is interfering with attempts to remove brltty? I am not expert enough wrt apt and its relatives to know whether that even makes sense, and it seems a bit far fetched if maybe barely possible.
Maybe if you post the output from "apt-rdepends -r brltty" and "apt purge --simulate brltty" it will be informative.

Neither of those utils are installed. Should they be?

apt should be installed. As far as I know it has been included by default in the Debian base system as the preferred command line package management program since buster or earlier. I have never had to install it. You probably should if it is missing.
apt-rdepends is at least partly redundant with apt.
The command "apt-rdepends -r <package-name>", and "apt rdepends <package-name>" both show reverse dependencies of <package-name>; the latter also shows suggestions (packages that suggest <package name, I think).
If you have apt installed, you probably do not need apt-rdepends.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Tom Dial
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through all that again.
Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide, and have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
   Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed packages other than the four listed above.
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
   Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
   Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
   Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and orca), that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a settings panel with a check box for "Enable speech" under the "Speech" tab. Unchecking that box and selecting the "Apply" button will silence Orca. I think that leaves some of its subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user task; I am far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps -ef | grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you can kill its parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if it is not a necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.
Regards,
Tom Dial

Thank you Tom
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

1560

The output of "which orca" would have told you the path to the orca program you ran. The orca program (Python script) that Debian installs with gnome is /usr/bin/orca.
With the orca that Debian installs along with gnome, typing "orca" in a command line and hitting the <Enter> key starts orca in its working mode. To get the GUI settings panel, you have to use "orca -s". See the orca man page for setup details.
orca's normal run mode is in the background with no screen presence

So I took orca out, which took gnome out. But now gnomes dependencies will put orca back in. So now I can't run autoremove. So one more time this broken damned bookworm install has bit me in a rear.

It appears you had more than one orca, different programs and for different, unrelated purposes. Debian installed only one of them. The other, hinted by the directory in which you ran the locate command, presumably was installed by you, and may be part of an AppImage. Or maybe it is the same orca, but installed with an appimage. I don't use AppImage packages knowingly, and only use non-distribution packages very sparingly, so have little to contribute on that subject.

I OTOH, have found AppImages a good way to get uptodate, and keep uptodate, packages like OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and the miriad 3d slicers, most of which do a new AppImage in the first week of the month. So the OpenSCAD I'm running is nearly 4 years newer than the repo version, and probably 20x faster.

You stated above that the "other" - non-Debian - orca was for 3D printers you don't use. That suggests you could remove it without interfering with anything.

It was an AppImage, rm-able.ff>

But you removed orca - the Debian-installed one - and just as apt (or apt-get) said when you did it, it removed gnome. And the result was unsatisfactory, as I said it probably would be in an earlier message on this thread.
The obvious solution is remove the other - non-Debian - Orca, note uppercase with whatever tools are appropriate to that. Then reinstall gnome. As you said, that will reinstall orca as a dependency. But once it is done, you can tune orca - the Debian one - to be less obtrusive, or even silent, in the way I described earlier.
If, for reasons, you can't remove the non-Debian orca, it might not even matter, since it silencing the Debian one is pretty easy

That I did not find easy. Disabling it also removes the ability to reboot as the boot hangs forever waiting for orca to start, quite early in the boot.  That little detail is responsible for the first 23 re-installs.

I don't oppose appimage use, except on a sort of vague esthetic basis or misplaced/unnecessary concern with resource use "efficiency." They certainly have valid use cases.
Restore the system to the point where it has the software installed that you want, plus gnome, plus the orca that came with gnome. Make sure brltty is gone, since you don't want it.
     apt purge brltty --yes
Reboot.
(Probably unnecessary, but it won't hurt and will ensure the system is in a fairly normal state).
     orca -s &
In 5 - 10 seconds, the "Screen Reader Preferences" panel should be displayed, with 8 tabs under the title. Left-click the "Speech" tab and make sure the "Enable speech" box is unchecked. Then left-click the "Apply" button at the bottom of the panel, and after that the "OK" button. The preferences panel will close in a few seconds.
Orca should no longer read screens. And the change should be persistent across logins and reboots: the settings are saved in your ~/.local/share/orca/ for later.

orca is gone, as is gnome. Apt and synaptic refuse to re-install gnome w/o dragging in orca too. Good night, whats left of it, Tom.

My advice, then, is to reinstall gnome, accept that orca will come with it, and then tame orca as I described immediately above in some detail.

If you are determined not to have orca installed, xfce4 does not require it, and there undoubtedly are other DEs that have no orca dependency.

You might be able to meet your objective by selectively install some or all of the packages that gnome depends on, omitting orca and the gnome package itself. I do not recommend it, however. It would be labor-intensive to start with, guarantee increased system maintenance workload in the future, and be likely to produce undesirable negative side effects as well.

Regards,
Tom.

You also could take care of orca for the current session by
     killall orca
but it would not be persistent across logins.
Also see
     https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/commands_speech_settings.html.en
     man orca
     /usr/share/doc/orca/README
I won't say it's the best documentation I have seen, but it is documentation, and better than some.
Regards,
Tom

.

Regards,
Tom Dial

Thanks Tom.
No Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[gene heskett]

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
If this was someone calling you from a TV station saying they had a TV
transmitter that was varying in power output - you'd have a mental checklist.
You'd get down there, perhaps schedule some sort of power down / reduced
power operation and then you'd check - power supplies, feeder cables, hot
spots on cables - whatever. Divide and conquer- working back to a baseline
of known working conditions and eliminating causes.
My suggestion to you of a reinstall is partly designed to get you out of this
"X happens, I did Y, now I've got Z" - to get to a known initial state.
Take out all the serial converters to UPS, lathe and so on. Wireless keyboard
doesn't present as serial in the same way that brltty does - if it did, I'd
have brltty with every install on this laptop.
Copy off your home directory as you did before - maybe using tar.gz
and preserving permissions. Start with the .iso that includes
firmware - the unofficial one.
Build back slowly - do an expert text mode install if you can. Then add your
Trinity desktop - I don't think any of us can help you there, since we don't
run trinity.
Check and you should find that brltty isn't installed at all. Then
re-add thingsgradually until you have the working system you want.
Document it - write down
the steps you take / copy configuration files you change.
That will also reveal logging / login slowdowns or whatever caused by
individual devices as you add them back. Keep a list as you go.
brltty
   Suggests: speechd-el (>= 3.7.2)
   Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Suggests: orca
   Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
   Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out??  What you are
proposing sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the
fire. This release has been such a disaster for me because the install
insists on installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've
done 40 some installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a
second while its yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm
blind. I finally have orca disabled and the computer is useful. The
delays are a pain in the a$$ but i can do work now. It is not useful
when orca is using 90% of a 6 core I5 yelling at me loud enough to
announce and pronounce every keystroke or mouse motion/click loud
enough to wake the neighbors.  The first 23 installs never asked me if
I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable it would not
reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it usable,
the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go through
all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it
thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion
that I do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it
now, it insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked
again with synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to
destroy the system, Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken
installer is "won't fix, not broken'.

Hi Gene,
I, too, am not in need of the services that  brltty or orca provide, and
have noticed them hanging about from time to time, although I have not
encountered any difficulties like you describe.
# apt-rdepends -r brltty
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
brltty
  Reverse Depends: brltty-espeak (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Reverse Depends: brltty-flite (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Reverse Depends: brltty-speechd (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
  Reverse Depends: brltty-x11 (= 6.3+dfsg-1+deb11u1)
brltty-espeak
brltty-flite
brltty-speechd
brltty-x11
If I understand apt-rdepends correctly, you should be able to
remove/purge brltty ("apt purge brltty") without removing any installed
packages other than the four listed above.

I have removed orca by removing its exec bits. But the system then will
not reboot, waiting forever for orca to start. The only recovery
possible is a re-install, which accounts for about the first 23
installs. But just like now, no one has told me how to REMOVE THEM ONCE
INSTALLED BY THE BROKEN INSTALLER. Finally i was instructed to remove
ALL usb stuff. Which did not remove them, but did not configure them to
run like I was blind. Some macular degeneration due to my age but not
blind yet at 89. And I still have both orca and brltty but unconfigured.
That I can tolerate. But in asking how to get rid of it, the subject
is always changed and I always get re-install instructions. Frustrating.

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
# apt-rdepends -r orca
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
orca
  Reverse Depends: gnome (>= 1:3.38+3)
  Reverse Depends: gnome-orca (3.38.2-2)
  Reverse Depends: orca-sops (1.0.2-2)
gnome
gnome-orca
orca-sops
So removing orca would also take gnome, and that probably is
unacceptable to you. Accordingly, you need to tame orca to find the
process that causes it to run and persuade it not to do that.
I found, on a bookworm install (I have no bullseye with gnome and orca),

This is bookworm.

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
that running orca -s from a terminal will bring up a settings panel with
a check box for "Enable speech" under the "Speech" tab. Unchecking that
box and selecting the "Apply" button will silence Orca. I think that
leaves some of its subtasks running, as children of the systemd --user
task; I am far from expert here. They do not seem to use significant
resources, however.
Alternatively, you can find orca's process, for instance, with "ps -ef |
grep orca", and kill it. The -HUP signal is enough. Or you can kill its
parent process (third column in the ps -ef output) if it is not a
necessary one, or maybe teach it how to not start orca in the first place,
I hope this is useful. Things like this can be very annoying.

An understatement Tom.
Thanks tom.
But when is trixie official.

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Regards,
Tom Dial

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Felix Miata]

Post by gene heskett
I always get re-install instructions. Frustrating.

Should you choose to accept any fresh installation suggestion by doing another,
consider removing the sound card from its slot, or disabling the motherboard's
sound device in BIOS setup, whichever is applicable, before beginning
installation, as a possible thwart to the Gnome must have everything paradigm, if
blocking Gnome entirely is unacceptable.

As a side note to installation: as soon as a fresh installation seems suitably
complete, but before adding any additional software, create a compressed /
filesystem partition backup image to facilitate any need for a consequent do-over.

Post by gene heskett
So this is the umptieth time I've asked how to fix it, and got recipes
for re-installing the basic system as an answer. Mike gave me instructs
to run a couple commands, once normally, once while it was hung but the
2nd comnnand I fed to wc -l and got almost 300k lines. Difficult to do
in real time because the command itself is subject to the lockout lag.

Answering a help request like this one is a toughie. It's commonly necessary to
reproduce both hardware configuration and software configuration in order to try
to address the problem. That can be quite complicated, and time consumptive. Here
it seems we may have a shortage from both helper and helpee, not necessarily a
fault of either, but a puzzle with missing pieces, in addition to some pieces that
don't belong to the puzzle (history tomes; not being concise). Could it also be
that we have too many cooks in the kitchen here too?

[gene heskett]

Post by Felix Miata

Post by gene heskett
I always get re-install instructions. Frustrating.

Should you choose to accept any fresh installation suggestion by doing another,
consider removing the sound card from its slot, or disabling the motherboard's
sound device in BIOS setup, whichever is applicable, before beginning
installation, as a possible thwart to the Gnome must have everything paradigm, if
blocking Gnome entirely is unacceptable.

That might be useful advice, but the sound card is not readily
removable, its built into this asus motherboard. An Asus PRIME Z370-A II.

Post by Felix Miata
As a side note to installation: as soon as a fresh installation seems suitably
complete, but before adding any additional software, create a compressed /
filesystem partition backup image to facilitate any need for a consequent do-over.

Post by gene heskett
So this is the umptieth time I've asked how to fix it, and got recipes
for re-installing the basic system as an answer. Mike gave me instructs
to run a couple commands, once normally, once while it was hung but the
2nd comnnand I fed to wc -l and got almost 300k lines. Difficult to do
in real time because the command itself is subject to the lockout lag.

Answering a help request like this one is a toughie. It's commonly necessary to
reproduce both hardware configuration and software configuration in order to try
to address the problem. That can be quite complicated, and time consumptive. Here
it seems we may have a shortage from both helper and helpee, not necessarily a
fault of either, but a puzzle with missing pieces, in addition to some pieces that
don't belong to the puzzle (history tomes; not being concise). Could it also be
that we have too many cooks in the kitchen here too?

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[Felix Miata]

Post by gene heskett

...or disabling the motherboard's
sound device in BIOS setup, whichever is applicable, before beginning
installation, as a possible thwart to the Gnome must have everything paradigm, if
blocking Gnome entirely is unacceptable.

That might be useful advice, but the sound card is not readily
removable, its built into this asus motherboard

Hence, removing its functionality by disabling sound device in UEFI BIOS setup.

[David Christensen]

On 6/5/24 08:21, gene heskett wrote:> <snip>

But in asking how to get rid of [orca], the subject
is always changed and I always get re-install instructions.

Because that is the most practical and correct answer for your
situation; especially given the disk access issues.


AIUI assistive technologies have been standard on FOSS graphical
workstations for years. It should be possible to turn assistance off,
but it might not be possible to eliminate the machine code throughout
the entire software stack.


I install Debian with the Xfce desktop, SSH server, and standard system
utilities onto minimal hardware. It takes a known amount of time and
usually works. I have successfully ignored assistive technologies for
years (decades?). Yes, the assistive technologies are wasting storage,
memory, and cycles, and they create a larger threat surface, but those
risks and costs are cheaper than me trying to understand and control all
of the details.


Succeeding with software requires that you devise strategies to work
within the limitations of the software. Alternatively with FOSS, you
can change the software.


David

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out?? What you are proposing
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have
orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$
but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core
I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or
mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors. The first 23 installs
never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable
it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it
usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go
through all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it
thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I
do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it
insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with
synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system,
Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not
broken'.

How long until trixie is out? Could be 12-15 months.

Are you still running Bullseye there? if so, you should probably upgrade
to Bookworm sometime soon.

Given that I wrote this to you two years ago: you didn't actually take
the suggestion and reinstall. That's OK - but nobody has ever been able
to get to the root cause of brokenness here. Is it a Gene problem or a
problem that hits other people more widely? We don't have details.

I see someone else has suggested strip a machine down to nothing and
do a clean install with Debian 12.5. Honestly, that's what I'd do.
If you can't/don't want to take this machine apart - find a spare
machine and do a Debian text mode install then install TDE.

At that point, you'll have a control - a counterpart that you can
check and you'll have done a complete install.

The suggestion that you can remove things and get it to work the
way you want is only valid if you can tell us *exactly* what you've
done so one of us can reproduce the problem. At this distance, that's
unlikely. It's not a complete cop-out but it would be easier if you could
do some sort of clean install. I'd help walk you through the steps: at
this rate, it might have been quicker for me to just airfreight you a
working machine :)

All the very best, as ever,

Andy

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis

[gene heskett]

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater

Post by gene heskett

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Hi Gene,
You could try apt-get remove (or equivalent) on each of those packages and
see if that clears it. I _know_ this is frustrating as all get out for you
but a clear approach, written down so that you can remember where you got
to will be very helpful.
If all else fails, you can then share it with the list and say "I got to
step X with no problems, then Y happened - help me out here" and we'll
have some better idea. We all jib at you for being vague/not indluding
details but otherwise it is all just guesswork for the usual folk that
hang out here.
All the very best, as ever,
Andy Cater

How much longer till trixie is officially out?? What you are proposing
sounds like several days work, and i have other irons in the fire. This
release has been such a disaster for me because the install insists on
installing and configuring orca and brltty w/o asking. I've done 40 some
installs now, trying to stop it from wasting about a second while its
yelling every keystroke at me because it thinks I'm blind. I finally have
orca disabled and the computer is useful. The delays are a pain in the a$$
but i can do work now. It is not useful when orca is using 90% of a 6 core
I5 yelling at me loud enough to announce and pronounce every keystroke or
mouse motion/click loud enough to wake the neighbors. The first 23 installs
never asked me if I wanted that crap. And if you nuked the orca executable
it would not reboot but hung forever waiting for orca to start. I have it
usable, the installer AFAIAC is broken and I don't want to have to go
through all that again. Until the installer ASKS me if I want it because it
thinks I am blind, I have only one nerve left and and the suggestion that I
do yet another install, is standing on it. Trying to remove it now, it
insists on removing gnome and every dependency. I just checked again with
synaptic, removing either orca or brltty still wants to destroy the system,
Yet all I get when I fuss about the broken installer is "won't fix, not
broken'.

How long until trixie is out? Could be 12-15 months.
Are you still running Bullseye there? if so, you should probably upgrade
to Bookworm sometime soon.
Given that I wrote this to you two years ago: you didn't actually take
the suggestion and reinstall. That's OK - but nobody has ever been able
to get to the root cause of brokenness here. Is it a Gene problem or a
problem that hits other people more widely? We don't have details.

They have been given quite a few times, Andy. Simplified, I had just a
week before, installed 2 more 2T seagate's, one for amanda, one for
boot. I already had /home on a raid10 of 1T samsungs. About 10 days
later both of the 2T segates dropped off the bus, never to be heard from
again. Research disclosed that they were helium filled drives of
shingled architecture, so seagate was using me, at $150 a pop, for a lab
rat. At that point it was bullseye. The only other machine that had an
optical drive was an old dell in the garage running my original milling
machine, so I went to it, and downloaded the bookworm full installer and
put it on a dvd. The installer found a couple usb-serial adaptors,
ASSUMED they were driving an audio tty, automatically installing and
configuring both brltty and orca to start very early in the boot. BUT if
they are there but disabled it waits forever for orca to start, which
caused the first 23 re-installs. A year+ later I don't recall what i did
but they are installed but out of the loop, so with reservations, the
machine is usable. The reservations are that its not very stable, x is
crashing about halfway thru a workspace change at about 2 week
intervals, and anything that opens a path to storage, is frozen for 30
seconds or more if it will wait, or if it won't wait, disables that
function but like digiKam, goes thru the motions of downloading from my
camera without actually doing it. Fortunately, shotwell works but hangs
at startup for 30 secs or more, and does gimp, GpenSCAD and anything
else that opens a path to storage. All w/o logging a single error msg,
In gimps case, each cd to a new path invokes the freeze all over again.

I've been a linux only house since 1998 when I put redhat 5.0 on a 400
mhz K6, this "bookworm" is the worst experience I've had in the last 26
years.

So this is the umptieth time I've asked how to fix it, and got recipes
for re-installing the basic system as an answer. Mike gave me instructs
to run a couple commands, once normally, once while it was hung but the
2nd comnnand I fed to wc -l and got almost 300k lines. Difficult to do
in real time because the command itself is subject to the lockout lag.

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
I see someone else has suggested strip a machine down to nothing and
do a clean install with Debian 12.5. Honestly, that's what I'd do.
If you can't/don't want to take this machine apart - find a spare
machine and do a Debian text mode install then install TDE.
At that point, you'll have a control - a counterpart that you can
check and you'll have done a complete install.
The suggestion that you can remove things and get it to work the
way you want is only valid if you can tell us *exactly* what you've
done so one of us can reproduce the problem. At this distance, that's
unlikely. It's not a complete cop-out but it would be easier if you could
do some sort of clean install. I'd help walk you through the steps: at
this rate, it might have been quicker for me to just airfreight you a
working machine :)
All the very best, as ever,

Same to you Andy.

Post by Andrew M.A. Cater
Andy

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

[David Wright]

Post by Gene Heskett
/proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus=0000 Vendor=0000 Product=0000 Version=0000
/proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard"
/proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11
/proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14
/proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq=
/proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=100003
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=402000007 ffc03078f800d2a9 f2beffdfffefffff fffffffffffffffe
Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in the bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY manual??? In which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet another install just to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.

I have no idea. You might try running hwinfo repeatedly with different
plugs pulled out. I don't have access to your USB tree to see what's
there, but I assume something is describing itself as a BRLTTY.

I don't see anything here that has P: Phys=pid-221. I do know
that PID Controllers are used to run motors, which might help.
You run motors, and I've read that some braille machines use
motors to drive the bumps, so that might be a source of
confusion when probing the hardware. I guess that's something
you tackle with modules.alias, or udev rules, or whatever,
depending on how your system configures its devices.

Cheers,
David.

[john doe]

Post by Gene Heskett
/proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus=0000 Vendor=0000 Product=0000 Version=0000
/proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard"
/proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11
/proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14
/proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq=
/proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=100003
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=402000007 ffc03078f800d2a9 f2beffdfffefffff fffffffffffffffe
Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in the bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY manual??? In which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet another install just to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.

Given that you have access to the installer log and are able to
reinstall, you should open a ticket with your issue.
Having an issue fixed will help you and the community.

--
John Doe

[David Wright]

Post by john doe

Post by Gene Heskett
/proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus=0000 Vendor=0000 Product=0000 Version=0000
/proc/bus/input/devices: N: Name="BRLTTY 6.3 Linux Screen Driver Keyboard"
/proc/bus/input/devices: P: Phys=pid-221/brltty/11
/proc/bus/input/devices: S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input14
/proc/bus/input/devices: U: Uniq=
/proc/bus/input/devices: H: Handlers=sysrq kbd event9
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: PROP=0
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: EV=100003
/proc/bus/input/devices: B: KEY=402000007 ffc03078f800d2a9 f2beffdfffefffff fffffffffffffffe
Does that look like its part of the mobo, and might be disable-able in the bios->tools menu, which is otherwise ignored in the users DIY manual??? In which case it might solve my problem, but would involve yet another install just to get the installer to get rid of it. IDK.

Given that you have access to the installer log and are able to
reinstall, you should open a ticket with your issue.
Having an issue fixed will help you and the community.

According to https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2022/02/msg00684.html
the installer log isn't available. I don't know why.

"[Me:] If you're talking about the syslog that ends up in
/var/log/installer/, big deal. For verbosity, [ … ]

"[Gene:] Not THAT syslog, which isn't there, but its with /var/log/syslog, the main deal."

Cheers,
David.

[David Christensen]

Post by Gene Heskett
terminals went funkity late tuesday, spent Wed-Thu trying to reboot, would not go beyond the 15 second mark rebooting. Finally ran the net installer in rescue mode, copied my 122gb /home dir, on a 1.9T raid10 to a different drive and reinstalled, then copied it back, but kmail refuses to use the copied back data so I'm using FF to post this.
I also need to get totally, absolutely rid of brltty, its driving me berzerk with its incessant muttering in a voice as bandwidth limited, or worse, than a cell phone. Understandable maybe 5% of the time. I purposely did NOT even visit those pieces of the installer for fear it would be enabled, because even though killed by removing brltty in the previous install, 90% of the syslog was errors because it couldn't use brltty. But I got it anyway. So how do it get rid of it without it tearing down the system with its copius error screaming?
Thanks for any advice on these two fronts.
Cheers, Gene
I'm on web mail using FF, which does not quote worth a damn. My "usb

tree" looks like a weeping willow and contains several devices that
answer to serial protocols. Both this keyboard and this mouse are
wireless, and speak serial. So how am I supposed to install with no
keyboard?

Post by Gene Heskett
Interesting question that.
Thanks, Cheers Gene

Post by Greg Wooledge
But what are the *actual* symptoms? What did Gene see? What did he
try, to troubleshoot, and what results did he get?

Exactly what I wrote Greg, the boot stops at the 15 second mark,

forever. I let it set there once for several hours while I caught some
shuteye.

Post by Gene Heskett
Repeated at least 20 times.
Putting the install dvd in that drive, and selecting rescue mode,

works and I was able to make a backup of /home. Then I reinstalled. And
on the reboot after the install this PITA of a blast of unintelligible
noise per keystroke was back and I did not go anywhere near those menu
item for this install.

Post by Gene Heskett

Post by Greg Wooledge
These are basic questions that someone with Gene's level of experience
shouldn't need to be asked.

Maybe so but I also getting upset with the feigned ignorance of what

I type you won't believe. I said it stopped at about 15 seconds and I
don't understand your lack of comprehension of the word "stopped". At
that point, the only thing that worked was the front panel of this 30"
towers reset button, or after a delay, the power button.

Post by Gene Heskett
Right now I've removed brltty and its api library which stops he

racket of unintelligible sound, but my syslog is growing by abut 6 lines
of errors per keystroke because brltty can't be found, or about every 4
or 5 seconds even if the keyboard isn't in use.

Post by Gene Heskett
I need to find a way to remove this stuff w/o eviscerating half the

system with its dependencies. Respin the installer for 11-4 if needed
but this needs fixed.

Post by Gene Heskett
I'd also bet you a six pack of suds it won't reboot right now because

I have removed brltty, and that IS the 15 second showstopper. But if my
theory is correct, it will also add to the reinstall count which is
already annoyingly high. Which with this system means at least a day to
do it.

Post by Gene Heskett
Give us back stretch, once the install was fixed so it had

networking, it just worked, till hell froze over.

Post by Gene Heskett
Oh, since we're on the subject, how do I put an option on the kernel

load line,(in grub.cfg) to make very noisy debugging so the next time I
have to reboot, I can see exactly what stopped it. That would be a
great help.

Post by Gene Heskett
Thanks Greg, take care and stay well.
Cheers Gene

I recall that you have several computers, that your hobby is using Linux
for CNC woodworking, and that you modify the OS's significantly and/or
install specialized, non-Debian software.


I have found that when I install too much software, when I put
non-Debian software on a Debian computer, and/or when I make too many
changes to the OS and/or software, that the computer becomes unstable.


I have found it useful to spread storage and functionality across
several computers, to limit the scope of disasters and to facilitate
recovery. These are the three key computers at my site:

1. Primary workstation.

2. Live server (Samba and SSH/CVS).

3. Backup/ archive/ image/ replication server.


For Debian and FreeBSD machines, including the above, I install the OS
as follows:

1. Disconnect all hard disk drives, solid-state drives, USB flash
drives, SDHC cards, etc..

2. Disconnect all external devices from the computer except a keyboard,
a mouse, a monitor, and the network connection (servers and desktops),
or the network connection (laptops).

3. Install a blank SSD. Ensure that it is the first device node when
the installer runs (e.g. /dev/sda).

4. Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD, using
BIOS, MBR, and partitioning the OS drive such that the system image fits
onto "16 GB" devices with room to spare -- 1 GB ext4 boot, 1 GB
encrypted swap, 12 GB encrypted ext4 root.


For the key computers, I then install "official" packages for only the
software needed for the chosen function. For a Debian primary
workstation, I also install the Debianized VirtualBox from Oracle.


I use VM's and/or additional computers for everything else.


The small OS image size makes it easy to take and restore images;
monthly and as needed. I keep all of the system configuration files in
a version control system (CVS). And, I backup boot and root daily and
as needed. So, when an OS instance becomes damaged, recovery is
straight-forward.


Your computer with the RAID10 (4 @ 1 TB HDD?) would seem to be the
logical choice for use as a live server. Put the OS on a small SSD and
use the big disks for data.


Pick a machine to use as your workstation. Put the OS on a small SSD
and move as much of the 122 GB as you can to the live server. My home
directory is ~2.6 GB and fits on root. Most of that is used by Xfce and
apps. The only volatile user data is e-mail. If you cannot shrink your
home directory, move it to another partition or to a second SSD.


Pick a machine to use as your backup (Amanda?), etc., server. Again, a
small SSD for the OS; one or more big disks for backups, etc..


David

[Felix Miata]

Post by David Christensen
4. Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD, using
BIOS, MBR, and partitioning the OS drive such that the system image fits
onto "16 GB" devices with room to spare -- 1 GB ext4 boot, 1 GB
encrypted swap, 12 GB encrypted ext4 root.

1 + 1 + 12 = 14. Does the remaining 2 remain unallocated?

[David Christensen]

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Christensen
4. Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD, using
BIOS, MBR, and partitioning the OS drive such that the system image fits
onto "16 GB" devices with room to spare -- 1 GB ext4 boot, 1 GB
encrypted swap, 12 GB encrypted ext4 root.

1 + 1 + 12 = 14. Does the remaining 2 remain unallocated?

Yes -- to allow for "16 GB" devices with differing block counts.


David

[gene heskett]

Post by David Christensen

Post by Felix Miata

Post by David Christensen
4. Do the simplest install of the OS of choice onto the SSD, using
BIOS, MBR, and partitioning the OS drive such that the system image
fits onto "16 GB" devices with room to spare -- 1 GB ext4 boot, 1
GB encrypted swap, 12 GB encrypted ext4 root.

1 + 1 + 12 = 14. Does the remaining 2 remain unallocated?

Yes -- to allow for "16 GB" devices with differing block counts.
David
.

Precisely.

Cheers, Gene Heskett.

[Charles Kroeger]

replace the GPU card Gene it's kaput.

C