speakup and hald conflict in Slackware 12.2

[Adam Myrow]

Hi.  I just wanted to make anybody who uses Slackware, and is planning to 
upgrade to Slackware 12.2 aware of a nasty conflict between Speakup and 
the HAL daemon (AKA hald.)

After I installed Slackware 12.2, and rebooted, Speakup came up with 
incredibly slow response times!  It took up to 5 seconds to respond to any 
key press.  This is with a Dectalk USB in serial mode, so it emulates a 
Dectalk Express.  Since this did not happen on the install CD, I did some 
tests, and eventually found out that this didn't happen if I removed the 
execute bit on /etc/rc.d/rc.hald.  This prevents the HAL daemon from 
starting up at boot time.  As long as it isn't running, Speakup will 
respond normally.  So far as I know, only X applications use this daemon 
to automount CD ROMs and other removable disks when they are inserted. 
So, as long as you don't run X, this should be OK.  Has anybody else ran 
into this problem?  Or, is it a bug specific to Slackware?