Beginner Questions

[Lorne Webber]

Hello Folks:
This is the first time posting to this group so I'm not sure if this is a
little out of scope, but I was hoping somebody out there could give some
suggestions
for the following situation:
I'm a totally blind second year student in the department of computer
science at the University of Alberta, and for the rest of my degree, most of
my courses
involve me using Linux.
I'm working with the system admin for the department of computing science to
get Linux up and working with speak up.
Since the rest of the students will be working in the slackware environment
we decided to go the same route, which shouldn't pose any problems as speak
up is supposed to work fine with slackware.
We're first trying it out on a Dell box in the lab, and once we have that up
and running, we're going to try and put it on my laptop, dual booting it
with
Windows using Lilo.
The system admin is the one who's doing the nuts and bolts of this, as
currently the only way I have of accessing the Linux systems there is by
remote connecting
to the Linux systems using an ssh client over windows.
I was hoping you folks could have a look at the following email from the
system admin, and give some ideas on the questions
he poses.
Again I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this sort of thing, if
you could direct me to a more appropriate place please do.
Thanks for your time.
Lorne
-----------
Hello,
   I am a long-in-tooth system administrator here in the Dept. of Computing
 Science at the University of Alberta.
We're trying to get a Dell GX270 working with
 Slackware version 10 and Speak-up.  The Dell's processor is a P4 2.8GHz
 Intel and it has 512 Mbytes of RAM and lots of disk space(>40 Gbytes).
   My first problem is that I am "blind-technology" disabled, so I have been
 learning on the fly.  I was hoping to use the onboard sound on the Dell as
I
 saw from the Speak-up web-site that there were two software synthesizers,
 the TuxTalk software synthesizer and also (perhaps) the Speakup soft synth
 device.  I've found out that I don't know what the softsynth device is nor
 can I find any explanation of it(although that is my problem).  Could you
 explain to me what the softsynth device is?
   The Slackware kernel appears to be configured properly as when the
softsynth
 device is set at bootup I see in /proc/speakup/synth_name that the proper
 thing (sftsyn) has been set and I can set the volume and other things just
 fine.
   Problem number two is: I need two examples of system configurations that
 work.  One for a workstation and one for a laptop.  The bases of the
problem
 is: is it better to work with a hardware synthesizer with either system or
 will a software synthesizer like TuxTalk do the trick?  I'm looking for a
 statement like:
 "a workstation P4 based system with 512 Mbytes of RAM, a SoundBlaster
  compatible sound card and TuxTalk on Slackware 10 works"
 or "a laptop with a P4 and 256 Mbytes of RAM, Intel built-in sound and
 Tuxtalk will work just fine"
 or "its best for a workstation to go with a P4 based system, 512 Mbytes of
 RAM and a Doubletalk PCI card".
   Thank you for your time and consideration.
 - Rod