speakup.synth= vs modprobe

[John G. Heim]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg at romuald.net.eu.org>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 2:13 PM
Subject: Re: speakup.synth= vs modprobe


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> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 03:06:54PM -0400, al Sten-Clanton wrote:
>> Does this mean that, unlike with, say, Fedora 9 or the earlier versions 
>> of
>> GRML, you can't have speakup available early in the boot process?
>
> Yes, you can have speakup loaded even before the root file system
> comes up, if you're using an initrd which contains speakup built as
> modules. Basically, the behavior would be as if speakup was built into
> the kernel, except that speakup is built as modules in this case, and
> the kernel doesn't need to be rebuilt to include speakup.

Oh yeah, I never made that connection before. I always compiled speakup 
drivers as modules and then loaded them with the speakup.synth kernel parm. 
I never put any thought into whether I should put an m or a y in that box 
for compiling the drivers.  It seemed to work just as well either way. But 
it didn't really. I was missing some boot messages.

So that's why they went to initrd. I asked about that on a general linux 
list a few years ago and didn't understand the answers i got. I suppose 
there's lots of stuff that can go in there but for one thing, it allows the 
kernel to have access to would normally be in /lib/modules at a point before 
it can read the disk.

Ah, now I get it.

I really tricked myself though. I put a stock debian kernel on my PC at home 
and it came up talking. So I figured the speakup.synth parameter was still 
working. As it turns out, I had the module in /etc/modules too. So that's 
why it was loading it.