Which hardware synthesizer to buy?

[William Hubbs]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 11:22:56AM -0700, Gregory Nowak wrote:
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> On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 08:47:51AM -0400, Kirk Reiser wrote:
> > Even with a hardware synth we have nowhere near a power-up to shutdown
> > solution like we used to have.
> 
> I must say I was surprised when I read that. I've been using speakup
> since the 0.09 days, and haven't noticed any less bootup, or shutdown
> messages than before. I will admit though that I don't follow bootup
> and shutdown messages from start to finish, unless I have a specific
> reason to do so. As far as I know, having speakup and my synth driver
> built into the kernel, still gives me speech from what sounds like
> early on in the boot process, until the machine powers off, just like
> it always used to, or so it has seemed to me up until now. So, what
> have I overlooked, and am not aware of?

Greg,

you are correct about having speakup and the synth driver built in
giving you speech early in the boot process.  However, it is not as
early as it was with the older kernels, and I personally do not know of
a way that we will be able to come up that early at this point.

We made this change because of a bug that would cause the serial ports
that speakup was not using to be numbered incorrectly, for example, if
your synthesizer was on ttyS0 and you started speakup built in, ttyS1
would be renumbered to ttyS0, but it would not be renumbered if you did
not start speakup or if it was not built in.  This was caused because
speakup was being started before the kernel's serial driver.

For newer kernels (I believe 2.6.26 or later when the accessibility
drivers first appeared), we are installing as an accessibility driver if
you build speakup into the kernel, and we are starting late enough that
this is not an issue.

Let me know if that makes sense.

William