Speakup not talking on grml 1.1 softsynth

[Tony Baechler]

Michael Prokop wrote:
> * Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> The 1.1rc1 that I used has a relatively old version from cvs and I 
>> honestly can no longer recommend grml.
>>     
>
> Your "I honestly can no longer recommend grml" is a slap into my face.
>   


Hi,

My no longer recommending grml has nothing to do with Speakup support.  
Actually what attracted me to grml was just that.  I really like Debian 
but I don't like no official support for Speakup in the kernel or 
installer.  My reason for not recommending grml is that it installs 
literally hundreds of packages that I didn't need and aren't necessary.  
The problem was that by the time I got to a login prompt, I was 
practically out of memory.  I couldn't do much because the computer 
would lock up.  Once I removed the many unnecessary daemons and got my 
system as close to a vanilla Debian system as possible, my problems went 
away.  Unfortunately that meant removing every trace of grml and all the 
custom packages.

While I'm here, I'll try to anticipate your response.  You're probably 
going to say that you can deselect groups of packages in the grml2hd 
installer.  that might be true, but said installer doesn't work well 
with Speakup at least as of 1.1rc1.  I know of another person who had 
the same trouble.  Both him and I needed sighted help to do the actual 
installation.  Basically the problem is that the arrows don't tell me 
what the cursor is actually on, even when highlight tracking is on in 
Speakup.  I'll hear, for example, that I'm installing to hda1 when in 
fact the cursor is on hda2.  I wouldn't have known this without sighted 
help.  By the time I got to the package selection, I was frustrated and 
just wanted to get something working.

I have two other small complaints.  One is that I don't see why Speakup 
can't be included in the small or medium versions.  I don't want or need 
RAID, USB, LVM, SCSI, etc support.  I don't need software running as 
daemons which will try to crack other network sites.  I don't need 
Apache, Postfix, or an ftp server.  I would rather install grml-small or 
grml-medium and install the other packages that I want from Debian.  I 
can see why you wouldn't include Speakup in grml-small since the point 
is to be as small as possible, but I don't see why you couldn't include 
it in grml-medium.

With all of that said, I'm sorry that you feel insulted.  I didn't know 
you are reading this list or I would have elaborated at the time.  I 
obviously haven't used the final 1.1 release so hopefully some of these 
things have been addressed already.  I can say that there are some 
things about grml that I really like a lot.  One is the concentration on 
text tools.  In fact, I ended up giving up on installing X and Gnome 
because it wouldn't work no matter what, especially with the grml-x 
script.  There are enough console tools included that I haven't really 
needed X and I figured I would wait until I have a machine with more 
memory.  For a live CD, it is very complete and replaces the old rescue 
floppies of the past.  Again, the big attraction to me is that I could 
have speech at boot with Speakup.  Until the package and installer 
issues are fixed, I can't recommend it though.  One thing that would be 
helpful is to list the memory requirements somewhere online or during 
the installation.  I wouldn't have installed it if I would have realized 
the memory issues.  Finally, I realize that there is little you can do 
about it, but your download server is very slow.  Perhaps there are 
mirroring services out there which would be better.