Speakup Boot Diskss for Debian Sarge

[Darren Paskell]

Hi.

I have an Apollo II speech synthesizer which I want to be able to use with 
Speakup. I have succeeded in getting Speakup to work with it from Slackware 
8 and 9 installation media, although I haven't used Speakup for two years or 
so.  I have however tested the Apollo and its com port connection 
successfully under Dos and Windows. I have as yet no experience with 
compiling my own kernel, although this is something I intend to rectify once 
I have a working Linux system.

I downloaded the Speakup Net-Install ISO image of Sarge from 
<http://people.debian.org/~shane/netinst-speakup/>, and burned it to a cd. 
I've tried supplying

speakup speakup_synth=apolo

and

speakup26 speakup_synth=apolo

at the CD's boot prompt, but Speakup does not seem to be able to find my 
Apollo. I have verified that the installer does start after both commands. 
I've also tried downloading the floppy images from the Debian boot disks 
area on the Speakup ftp site. However, I still get no speech when supplying 
the

linux speakup_synth=apolo

command at the boot floppy's prompt.

I have tested the CD and floppy on two computers with the same Apollo 
connected to the first serial port, with the same result i.e. no speech. I 
would like to be able to run through a talking installation of Debian. Is 
this possible, and if so what can I do to debug the problem?

Thank you very much for any assistance you may be able to offer me.

Darren