Speakup not talking on grml 1.1 softsynth

[Michael Prokop]

* Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net> wrote:
> 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.

> 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.

How much RAM do you have? By default nearly no daemons are running
on grml.

> 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.

Why didn't you even report that problem? What do you think why we
are releasing release candidate versions?

> 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.

Well, why didn't you report your wish to the grml-team? The kernel
used on grml-medium provides speakup support already, what's missing
are the userspace tools.

> 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.

"Because it doesn't work for me it won't work for anyone out there?"

And because *you* encountered a bug in a single version without
telling that to the developer you can't recommend a product in
general? Just consume and don't give something back? Cool...

> 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.

http://grml.org/faq/#requirements - "at least 64MB of RAM (for
stable use with ramdisks for unionfs and udev and running X window
system we recommend at least 128MB)"

http://grml.org/grml2hd/ - "You should have a partition with at
least 2.7 GB free space to use grml 1.1."

> 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.

What server were/are you using for download and where are you from?

-mika-
-- 
 ,'"`.         http://michael-prokop.at/
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