I was just demonstrating the awesomeness of Ubuntu-Mate to a friend, and accidentally clicked the orca screen reader application in the cairo dock menu. I could not find an off button anywhere. Googling said that Alt-Super- S would toggle it on/off, but that didnt work. Eventually had to go into terminal and killall orca. (just in time to save my sanity) .
So I can see its a good program for those who need it , but I don’t . So I thought I would save a bit of memory and uninstall it. But according to Synaptic package manager it is a dependency of MATE. Am I right in thinking that uninstalling Orca will remove my Desktop as well?
I’m not sure, but did you try to purge/remove the program in terminal as root?
1 Like
No because Iam concerned that it will unistall the desktop as well. seeing as it is a dependency of it.
If it’s asking about removing ubuntu-mate-desktop, that’s a meta-package, and should be fine at the moment, but may cause problems with upgrades later on. See this thread: Clarification needed regarding removal of meta-packages
1 Like
Does going into Preferred Applications then removing the tick from Run at start prevent it from running on reboot? Alternatively, going into Startup Applications then removing the tick from Orca screen reader would be worth a try.
(The $64 million dollar question - does removing the tick from one, then rebooting, result in the tick not being shown on the other? I would expect so).
1 Like
I had already gone into startup apps and removed it from there, and its still in preferred applicationss but not ticked to startup. ( im not sure it was ticked before) but this dosn’t actually solve what happens . ie I accidentally started it from a menu and couldnt switch it off again. I can still launch the program from that cairo dock menu, although now its not taking up memory at least.
No I know how to kill it from the terminal. But, I was hoping to move my girlfriend to MATE in the next year or so. and this would be a problem. Also its sat on the disk never to be used intentionally
Well i was going to try and do an update to 15.10 when it came out to see if Ubuntu distros had improved since last i tried it ( aound 2006/07) so looks like I better not remove it. Not sure why this would be part of the Meta package for MATE though. I have to look into removing it from the menu. Not seen an option for editing the cairo menu yet though
Thanks for that link to the other post that was most informative
In order of increasing complexity and/or possibility to break something:
-
If just concerned about accidentally turning Orca on, then change the Keyboard Shortcut in the Control Center to something even harder to press than Alt+Mod4+s.
-
Rename the file ‘orca’ in /usr/bin :: This will prevent ‘orca’ from being executed.
-
Run the terminal command
$ dpkg -L gnome-orca
This lists all the files installed by the gnome-orca package. Disk space rather than memory, but… you could investigate backing up and removing folders like: /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/orca or /usr/share/help/fr/orca
Since the gnome-orca package itself is only 4 Mb, it can’t help much.
The packages are normally not that big and resources small, so it’s usually not worth the effort to start removing things this way. If the wrong dependency is removed, then something else can break.
-
It got accidentally turned on by a menu item not a hot key. Last night I couldnt see how to edit the menu in cairo-dock . But I have since found this just displays the menu that is accessible from the MATE Menu. And right clicking that gave me access to edit and to remove the offending entry ( Putting that here for the benefit of anyone who wants to edit the cairo-dock menu) I have also disabled the hot key as I really dont need this buggy program to run at all.
-
Interesting! does this have any impact on upgrades?
-
I am not really bothered by the space it takes up . my reasons for uninstalling are more like; it is surplus to requirements and appears very buggy. You cant turn it off without killing it in the terminal! . I really dont want something installed if its not doing anything but just sitting there as a target for some loophole of attack.
thanks for input , point 2 is really an idea I think
1 > Sounds like by disabling it from the MATE menu will take care of it.
2 > The most recent gnome-orca package/update put a new ‘orca’ executable in. If ubuntu-mate-desktop pulls in a new gnome-orca package, and they provide a new ‘orca’ then it just gets installed in the appropriate location unless somebody put some kind of checking in the preinst script. Worst case is the update fails at that point and you could rename ‘orca.old’ back to ‘orca’ then put it back as ‘orca.old’ after updating is done. As far as an updated ubuntu-mate-desktop, if it pulls in a new gnome-orca the behavior should be similar. So…it would seem far more likely that an update that included gnome-orca just re-enables what you wanted disabled!
I never do an upgrade from say 15.04 to 15.10, I just do an install from scratch. Heads off potential problems. But in this case I’d be surprised if a distro upgrade had issues with a rename of ‘orca’. Usually there are other issues with certain configuration that people had to do to get something working with their particular hardware.