Any experience w/ Debian Woody Speakup Packages?

[Thomas Stivers]

On 07/05/03 10:30 PM -0400, Hugh Esco wrote:
> I keep lurking on this list, hoping that I'll figure out how to get his 
> software synth to speak the dmesg's to him at startup -- or pretty close to 
> it, anyway.  I'm hopeful I can show him how to invoke lynx out of a shell, 
> perhaps use oleo for a spread sheet, teach him what is possible at a mysql 
> prompt, etc.  I'd love to show him that there is life (or at least least 
> audible feedback) without having to invoke emacspeak first.

There is a patch to speakup which causes it to work with festival, but
you still can't have a software synth before the root filesystem is
loaded. You can always examine all the boot messages with "dmesg |less" on a system which is up and running, but I know this doesn't help with kernel panics Etc.

> 	1)  Is there anyone out there with experience with the Debian 
> 	Speakup kernel package?  If so, what can you tell me about it?  What can I 
> expect?

The debian speakup package is a standard debian 2.4.20 kernel patched
with speakup with support for all synthesizers which speakup supports.
This package is patched with speakup 1.5 because speakup 2.0 which so
many on the list have been talking about is still under heavy
development

> 	2)  Will it accommodate a software synthesizer?

No, the debian package will not work with a software synthesizer. To get any software synthesizer support you must compile the kernel with speakup and with the patch I mensioned above.

> 	3)  If it won't, can someone who has built Speakup from source to 
> 	use a software synthesizer please tell me more of your experience?  Might 
> you be willing to share a phone number so I can get some coaching on an 
> installation?

I have built many speakup kernels, but I have never patched it for
festival. If they are on the list perhapse one of the developers of the
festival patch for speakup will be able to give you pointers.
 
He may also wish to consider yasr, which while not loading at startup
does support software speech and runs right from the shell I.E. no
emacs.

For reading mail one of the easiest mua's to use for beginners is pine.
It doesnot work well with emacspeak from what I hear, but it works well
with speakup and yasr. I personally use mutt, but it does not work as
well out of the box, or off the mirror as it were. The only problem with pine is that it is not free and therefore debian does not have pre-built packages for it. It is easy to get the source and build it though.

-- 
Unix is a user friendly operating system. It just picks its friends more
carefully than others.
Thomas Stivers	e-mail: stivers_t at tomass.dyndns.org	gpg: 45CBBABD