Speakout and com port installing slackware

[Joseph Norton]

Hi John:

Speakup may be able to autodetect your synth.  If not, read on.

Below is a section of the README file under the main slackware directory on 
booting up Slackware.  Note the section just below the example startup 
screen.  This tells you the parameters that should force Speakup to use a 
different com port.  The complete text of this file is at:

ftp://linux-speakup.org/pub/speakup/disks/slackware/README

3.  Booting Up For The First Time

Place your boot disk in the A: drive and reboot your machine.  After the
disk spins for a few seconds, you should be presented with a screen that
looks something like this:

--------------------
Welcome to the Slackware Linux (v. 7.1.0) bare.i bootdisk!

If you need to pass extra parameters to the kernel, enter them at the prompt
below after one of the valid configuration names:  ramdisk (to load a rootdisk
into memory and boot it), and mount (to boot an existing Linux partition).
NOTE:  Most hardware is auto-detected without parameters.  So, before assuming
        your system requires parameters, try a few different bootdisks. :^)

Here are some examples (and more can be found in the BOOTING file):
    ramdisk hdx=cyls,heads,sects,wpcom,irq  (needed only if probing fails)
    ramdisk hdx=cdrom (force detection of an IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drive)
    where hdx can be any of hda through hdh. Examples: 
hdc=1050,32,64  hdd=cdrom

If you would rather load the root/install disk from your second floppy drive:
    ramdisk root=/dev/fd1

In a pinch, you can boot your Linux system with a command like:
    mount root=/dev/hda1

DON'T SWITCH ANY DISKS YET! This prompt is just for entering extra parameters.
If you don't need to enter any parameters, hit ENTER to continue.

Boot:
--------------------

Press Enter when this message appears and you should hear the disk work
for about 30 seconds (this time may vary depending on several
factors).  The Linux kernel is being loaded at this time.  After this,
Speakup will try to autodetect your speech synthesizer and you should hear
your synthesizer start talking and reading the boot messages.  If this
doesn't happen, it is possible that Speakup wasn't able to detect your
synthesizer.  This can be due to several problems.  One problem I had was
that my LiteTalk was on com2 and I have a modem on com1.  Speakup didn't
get past the modem.  If this happens, you can force Speakup to use a
certain serial port to try to find the synthesizer on.  To do this, reboot
the system and at the Boot: prompt, type the word "ramdisk" a space and
speakup_ser=X (where X is the Linux serial port number.  This is usually
derived by subtracting 1 from the DOS comm port number.  For example, if
your synthesizer was on com2, you would use a command similar to this:

ramdisk speakup_ser=1

This will force Speakup to use com2 for your synthesizer.  If all goes
well, you should hear your synthesizer going through the boot messages.

The boot messages are quite lengthy (even for the boot disk), so you may
want to silence speech.  You do this by pressing the Enter key on the
numeric keypad.

If all goes well, you should have a message at the bottom of your screen
that looks something like this:

VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press ENTER

If you silenced speech with the numpad Enter, you should be able to press
7 on the numeric keypad to read the previous line and you should hear the
above message.