Bug: speech not coming up on boot

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

I'm using my custom Debian 2.6.24-6-686 kernel packages with Speakup 
3.0.2 and the DEC-talk Express driver version 1.9.  I have the Speakup 
core and DEC-talk Express built into the kernels, all the other synths 
are built as modules.  I appended the following string to the kernel 
command line in lilo.conf:

speakup.synth=dectlk speakup.ser=0 start=1

For an unknown reason, if I boot into Linux, speech will never come up 
the first time.  I've confirmed that the system boots and I can log in 
as root.  If I hit backspace, it beeps at the shell prompt.  If I 
reboot, speech will come up the second time.  This happens every time I 
boot for the first time in a session, whether the computer has been 
turned off or if I restart from within Windows and boot into Linux.  
This never happened with other kernels or other versions of Speakup.  If 
I hit the reset button while the system is booting but before the login 
prompt comes up, speech will work the next time.  If I log in as root 
and use the halt command to turn off power, speech won't come up on the 
next reboot.

Is there anything I can do to fix this problem?  I don't like pressing 
reset while the machine is booting but that seems to be the only way to 
get it to come up talking other than waiting for the login prompt and 
rebooting as root.  I suppose it could be my kernel but I don't see 
how.  The reason why I had the DEC Express driver built into the kernel 
is so I would have speech at boot without loading modules.  I haven't 
tried switching to software speech of anything else after boot because I 
have no way of knowing when I'm at the login prompt except to wait and 
hope it booted correctly.  At one point, my partition was not unmounted 
cleanly so it did a filesystem check but I had no way of knowing this 
until I got speech working again.  I can send kernel boot messages if it 
would help.  I have a very basic setup so there should be no need for 
extra drivers to load.