Problem with speakup software synthesis if speechd-up or espeakup not running

[William Hubbs]

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Hi Alastair,

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:21:19PM +0000, Alastair Irving wrote:
> I'm running speakup on a gentoo system under vmware, kernel version 
> 2.6.27-gentoo-r8, and the gentoo speakup ebuild which is revision 
> 2008.08.02.  I use the software synthesis module.
>
> Everything is generally working fine, however, if I do anything that would 
> cause speakup to speak when either speechd-up or espeakup is not running, 
> (even just pressing a single key), the whole system crashes.  I assume its 
> some kind of kernel pannic, I can no longer read the screen with brltty, or 
> SSH in, or do anything, (so I don't know if any errors are printed to the 
> screen at this point).  This is rather annoying as to start speakup I have 
> to use sSSH to modprobe speakup_soft and load espeakup.  Once I've done 
> this I can use the system normally and it speaks.  Similarly, before 
> shutting down the system I have to SSH in, and unload espeakup and modprobe 
> -r speakup_soft.  Otherwise, if I shutdown, espeakup is unloaded and then 
> presumably speakup tries to say something and everything hangs.
>
> I've looked in the syslog after rebooting, but no errors are shown.
>
>
> Has anyone else experienced this?  It seems rather bizarre and I don't know 
> what to try to resolve it.

Unfortunately, this is a known bug which we haven't been able to find
yet.

The weird thing about it is that it doesn't happen on all systems.  I am
running gentoo as well and I have been completely unable to reproduce
it.

Any information at all that you can give us would help greatly.

Thanks,

William

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