Inquiry

[Steve Holmes]

I'll just offer some quick summaries here.  Look thoroughly around
www.linux-speakup.org for what you can read about speakup and how to
use it effectively.  In general, Speakup is a set of patches to the
Linux kernel to enable the output from the Linux text consoles to be
spoken through a *HARDWARE* speech synthesizer.  So to answer one of
your questions, you need a kernel that has been patched with Speakup.
For starters most of the popular distributions such as Slackware,
Debian, and Redhat do come with such kernels already built.  If your
are willing to dump Speakup into a fresh kernel source, then I would
untar the kernel like normal and untar the speakup package into
/usr/src as well, then cd into /usr/src/speakup and run the install
script.  That script will apply the patches for you and then you would
proceed with the kernel configuration.

Now you said you are new to Linux so I would recommend starting out
with a pre-compiled kernel that hopefully works with your computer's
hardware and just use the appropriate command line options to pick
your synthesizer.  Example, for me I use a Speakout so at the boot
prompt, I would type
Linux speakup_synth=spkout
where I typed linux above, you might need to enter something else.
This depends highly on whose distribution you use and which kernel
image you use.  Sorry if this sounds vague but this is where some
distribution specific information would have to be read and there is
plenty on the www speakup site.  Slackware has some speakup related
information right in the root directory of the first CD.

Hope this helps you out some.
-- 
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