Ubuntu comes in several ways, from purchased CD to downloadable ISO image. I'll chose to download the ISO image and burn it myself. After I've burned the ISO image on a blank 700MB CD, I rebooted the system and pressed a key to boot from the Ubuntu CD. Then, I was presented with a screen with a few options. To enable the accessibility features of the combined live/install CD, you'll need to press F5 after the menu appears and then to press down arrow 3 times. Then, you'll be focused on the option to load the system with speech output enable. I pressed enter on that option and then I go back to the main menu. The first item is "Start/Install Ubuntu" so I just pressed enter again. At this point you'll no have speech, so you should wait a few seconds... well a few minutes the boot process to complete. I was disappointed that after the CD stops spinning, you cannot see whether the system is loaded or not so you should press ALt+F2 to wait a second and then to type "orca" without the quotes. After a few seconds Orca should start speaking to you.

After you have speech you can proceed to the actual installation of your GNU operating system. The instructions for installing Ubuntu can be found in several places so if you want more detailed instructions just Google for "Install Ubuntu with speech" and you'll find more information on the issue. To start the installer:

• Press ALT+F2 to get into the Run application dialog box where type "gnome-terminal" without the quotes. A new window will appear. It is similar to the ordinary command prompt in Windows but has graphical interface.
• In the terminal, press Insert+Q in order to quit Orca. This step is required in order to continue without any issues. Orca will ask you whether you really want to exit, answer with yes. When you lose speech, you'll be focused in the terminal again.
• Type "sudo orca --no-setup --disable main-window&" without the quotes and press enter. Orca will launches but with its default settings instead of your preferred settings and adjustments. Again in the terminal, type "Ubiquity" without the quotes and the installer will pop-up.
• Here you can use your arrow keys to make selections and if you stuck somewhere, you can use CTRL+Tab to focus whenever you want in the installer. Use "Space bar" to forward to the next step.

I'll not explain the actual installation process, only I'll point that in the partition manager, if you want to keep your current operating system and partitions it's good to use "manual" mode and then to choose on which partition to install Ubuntu. Just a note: If you want to pass all possible problems, create one Ext3 partition with a size minimum of 3GB (5GB is recommended) and one swap partition (256/512MB is preferable) under Windows and in the Ubuntu installer just select the Ext3 partition you've created earlier.

Configuration and usage