at a loss

[Adam Myrow]

On Thu, 5 May 2005, Janina Sajka wrote:

> If he's getting kernel panic, there should still be speech, as you say.

In most cases, yes.  However, if something tries to kill the "init" 
process, speech will suddenly become very choppy, as though it were 
constantly being interrupted.  I ran across this once when I was 
experimenting with an initred under an older release of Slackware.  I 
think it was Slackware 9.1, and it didn't have the mkinitrd command as 
later versions do.  So, I had hand-built the initrd, and the 
documentation with the kernel tells you to run an exec command to run the 
regular initrd rather than letting the system do it for you.  I messed up 
the exec command, so there was nothing to replace the linuxrc script which 
was acting as the init process, so I got the kernel panic for an attempt 
to kill init, and speech became almost unusable.  I had to read it word by 
word, and infer the message from the choppy sounds the synthesizer was 
making.  Other than that, speech should remain operable in most panic 
situations, but if something is killing the init process, that could 
explain the garbled sounds.