Intro and newbie questions

[Garry Turkington]

Hi,

Firstly a greeting to all on the list from a newcomer.  My name is Garry 
Turkington and though I'm new to Speakup I've been using and developing on 
Linux since about 1995 or so.  In that time I've used a DOS screen reader 
and accessed a Linux box as a dumb serial console.  However, having to 
keep my main desktop as an eternal dual boot finally frustrated me enough 
to want to do something about native access to Linux.

Which implies I really should know enough to get Speakup working!  Despite 
this though I've a few questions which hopefully someone can clear up for 
me.

As I've already got a number of established RedHat or Fedora installs I 
just want to add Speakup to one or more of these, not do a fresh install 
from the modified Shrike ISOs on the website.  Apart from the -spk2 kernel 
packages are there any other differences between these disks and the stock 
RH 9?

WWhen looking to build Speakup into a kernel tree I firstly did some 
poking around the RH/Fedora kernel config files and noticed that the 
Speakup definitions are in there but never used.  Memory also seems to 
suggest that at one point, (maybe around RH 7.3 or 8?) that Speakup was 
fully built into the 'out of the box' kernel?  Any pointers to the history 
here and what's going on?

Finally, to bootstrap things I installed the latest -spk2 kernel from the 
Shrike ISOs into a running RH9 system and then tried a "modprobe 
speakup_decext" to use my Dectalk Express.  I think though that Speakup is 
trying to grab /dev/ttyS0, which is my current serial console and things 
get a bit messed up from that point.  Losing the serial console also makes 
it hard to debug.  /dev/ttyS1 should be properly set up, does the speakup 
module take parameters to tell it which serial port to use?

Many thanks for any info/help,
Garry

-- 
Garry Turkington   
garry.turkington at acm.org