speakup, 2.6.22, and the way forward

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 08:54:11PM -0500, John Heim wrote:
> Another one is where you messed up menu.lst.

That's a boot loader issue, so I don't really see how it relates to
the need to hear boot messages, unless you've modified a menu.lst so
much that you accidently specified the wrong root partition from what
was there before the modification. In that case, this would also
generate a kernel panic, that you'd need speech at boot to
hear. However, if you didn't burn your bridges so to speak when
modifying menu.lst, it should be a fairly simple matter to boot back
into your old working kernel, and look through menu.lst for the
problem, which shouldn't take long to find, since you're the one who
made the modification that would have caused it in the first place.

> These things come up all the time for me. We install Windows via a live CD. 
> I modified the kernel on the live CD to include speakup so that I can tell 
> what's going on during an install. Same for installing linux. Of course, I 
> use Shane's modified debian install CD but I also use another open source 
> project called FAI or "Fully Automated Install" to do mass installs. Again, 
> it has a live CD to which  I added a speakup modified kernel. And most of 
> our servers have custom kernels.
> 

Again, I don't see the argument here for the necessity of hearing boot
messages as they happen. You should be able to start speakup, or
another screen reader early in the boot process, once the root file
system loads, which would still give you the ability to use dmesg if
you needed it. The only time I see the need for speech during boot is
if the creation of the livecd got screwed up while it was being created, and
the kernel couldn't find the root file system, which brings me back to
the first reason I stated when you really would need speech at
boot. Again, even if there was no speech during boot, and the iso
didn't do what it was supposed to, (I.E. in the worst case, the screen
reader failed to start), then in most cases it would just be a matter
of carefully going over your work when you created the cd, to find the problem.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that speech during boot is never
needed, and should be eliminated. What I am saying is that it isn't
absolutely necessary to have it, and not having it wouldn't be the
end of the world, provided that one uses one's brain to solve problems
that come up while speech isn't available. Granted, that's harder to
do in most cases without speech, but again, as I've pointed out above,
it can be done, and isn't the end of the world. I guess I'm not
convinced still by the arguments I've seen so far for speech during
boot being an essential and absolute necessity.

Greg


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