Latest Debian snapshot

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

First, thank you very much, Samuel!  I was hoping for a new snapshot to 
be released as a Debian package.  Is there any chance that the new 
package will make it to Lenny with the big freeze looming?

I only found two small problems and one very nice improvement.  The bug 
with my rc.local not being able to set parameters is fixed!  The 
synthesizer seems to respond slightly quicker to key presses.  I think I 
remember work being done either with threading or with keyboard input.  
Whatever it is, I can tell the difference.  The synth keeps up with my 
typing speed instead of having a slight lag.  I haven't thoroughly 
tested everything, but I tried Alt+left arrow and it didn't lock up.  I 
haven't checked if the speech stopping after about 4 KB of text has been 
fixed yet.  Over all, I'm impressed.

The two small problems are as follows:  First, I followed Samuel's 
instructions for building modules.  I did the following commands:

m-a prepare
tar -jxf speakup*.tar.bz2
cd modules/speakup  (I was already in /usr/src)
make
make modules_install

The problems are that it isn't obvious that the Speakup source is 
installed under /usr/src/modules/speakup.  I tried changing to the 
speakup directory but it didn't exist.  I wasn't sure if I needed to 
untar the source or not.  I suppose that the modules/speakup directory 
structure needs to stay in place because of Debian policy, but why not 
make a symlink?  If that can't be done, please put a note in 
README.Debian for installing manually since the source in Debian won't 
always be the latest from git, especially when running Stable.  The 
second problem is the underline in modules_install.  Most packages I've 
compiled from source use a dash instead, such as make modules-install.  
For that matter, why not support "make install" instead?

The second problem is slightly more serious.  Apparently the Speakup 
modules must go in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra/speakup.  The "make 
modules_install" command put them in the extra directory but not in 
extra/speakup.  I had to manually copy them there.  Until I did, it kept 
loading the old modules, as /sys/module/speakup/version reported 3.0.2.  
I noticed all the files in the speakup directory were older than those 
not, so I figured it was safe to copy them.  Now I have two sets of 
identical Speakup modules, one in the extra/ directory and another in 
extra/speakup/.  This should probably be fixed.

Again, other than those small issues, all seems well and I'm impressed 
by the better performance.  I'm intending on trying cdparanoia and CD 
burning to see if there is better performance.  Speech always stopped 
with cdparanoia because of the repeating progress bar, so that should be 
a good test.

To Michael and others experiencing problems, I recommend installing the 
new package from Samuel's previous post here.