Software Speech Synth with Speakup -- Help, please.

[Hugh Esco]

Hello friends:

I built a kernel as instructed at:
http://users.wpi.edu/~blinux/installation_instructions.txt

Festival is working, gives me a festival> prompt, but typing text for it to 
synthesize at the prompt gives me nothing.  An lsmod indicated that I have 
no sound modules loaded.  (Booting with Knoppix loaded cs4232, ad1848, 
uart401, sound and soundcore).

An ls *.o while in the /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound directory indicates 
that I have soundcore.o, but none of the others that Knoppix used.

Running esdplay /usr/share/sounds/*.wav returns an error:
         /dev/dsp: No such devise

Running ls -l /dev/dsp returns:
         crw-rw----    1 root     audio     14,   3 Mar 14  2002 /dev/dsp

I ran that as root, but hesco, my own user is a member of the audio group.

The instructions final few lines read:
>Then see what major number was given and create an appropriate entry in /dev.

How would I do this?  An ls -l /dev/usrdev indicates
         ls: /dev/usrdev: No such file or directory

>% mknod /dev/usrdev c 252 0
>
>Note that the major/minor numbers are currently hardcoded in at compile 
>time.  To change the major number being used just change 
>CHAR_REQUESTED_MAJOR_NUMBER in speakup_usrdev.h

hesco at biko:~$ locate speakup_usrdev.h
/usr/src/linux-2.4.20/drivers/char/speakup/speakup_usrdev.h
/usr/src/speakup-1.5/speakup/speakup_usrdev.h

These are files left over from previous attempts to compile Speakup.  The 
speakup_usrdev.h file in the tree I just built says that variable is 252, 
so I ran the mknod command given above and now see it showing up in the ls 
command.

>Finally (and optionally, but reccommended) add the festival server and 
>middleware program to your init scripts and when you reboot your computer 
>should start talking right away.

My Debian /etc/init.d directory already had a festival shell script, in 
which I commented out the "exit 0" line, since the comments indicated that 
that would automatically start Festival at startup.

I'm assuming that middleware refers to:
         /usr/src/speakup_1.5/middleware/middleware
a binary file which does not execute when I attempt to invoke it, giving me 
the following error:
         Failed to open file: No such device
which may very well be related to the sound problems I'm having.

My questions related to this are:

         Is this the correct middleware to invoke in my init.d scripts?

         I searched in vain among the Sound menu in make menuconfig to find 
the cs4232 module for the CS4236B chip which is installed on my 
motherboard.  Where can I find what I need?  How can I get it built into 
the kernel?

What am I missing here that is keeping me from running speakup?

As always, all help appreciated.

-- Hugh Esco

P.S.    On the brighter side, I have existed without sound or ethernet 
(including samba networked cups printing) since my last attempt to build 
speakup, when late one night / early the next morning, apparently 
bleary-eyed, I somehow messed up my working kernel and was left with a 
crippled machine.  I used Tom's RTBT to fire it back up, rebuild a bootable 
but featureless kernel and get back in.  While I still have not worked out 
this sound issue, apparently, I now have this machine accepting connections 
across the ethernet, again.  So this kernel wasn't a complete loss.  Still 
I'm eager to get the sound working.  -- HE