Can One Add Speakup Consoles to a Standard Deb Installation?

[Martin McCormick]

Jean-Philippe MENGUAL writes:
> Oralux doesn't exist anymore, as the organization thinks that alternate
> good solutions exist.

	I don't disagree at all. The challenge is finding one
that doesn't render what one has as not usable.

> The Debian installer includes speakup, which allows to work /ith a
> hardware speech synthetiser. The support for software speech synthetiser
> is in a non official CD on http://people.debian.org/~sthibault. The
> current CD to install testing (wheezy) contains speakup with support for
> software and hardware speech synthetiser. This feature is at this time
> on the alternate CD above.

	That is great to know. I like hardware synthecisers
because they can be made to talk if there is so much as a serial
console available, but then you have to buy/connect them to
whatever device you are trying to get going at the time.

	Software synthesis is my preference for fully-working
systems as nothing else needs to be added to make them work.

	Thankfully, we are having this conversation rather than
the ones we were having ten years ago which involved DOS/Windows
systems and one of several strategies for terminal access in to
the Unix box we really wanted to use.

	For literally about 19 years, I used a screen reader I
wrote for myself in 8086 assembler to intercept the video
interrupt where possible. I then used MSKermit for the VT10x
emulation to serially talk to whatever Unix box I was using at
the time.

	The Vinux2 installation that came out in 2009 gave me
something that was extremely similar to the same functionality I
had had with the EchoGP and DOS so I finally retired those old
systems.

	For those of us who like to do a lot of tinkering and
programming, a terminal console that only resets if you feed it
way too much or when you strike a key is the way to go.
Everything else ends up making me frustrated.

	I love the Macintosh and it's Alex voice is one of the
best synthecisers I have heard, but they missed speech flow
control by a country mile as the whole speech system resets
every time new data come in. You can not tail a syslog or get
good information from a compiler or anything else that gives
bursty output. You must let it stammer for a while and then
manually read the buffer which, to me is unacceptable.

	Speakup gets this aspect totally right in that if you
don't touch the keyboard, you can hear output as it arrives
until the buffer fills which, of course, is inevitable if new
data are arriving quickly.

	Anyway, thanks for both of the replies I got on this
list from Jean-Philippe MENGUAL and Larry Hart.

	The present Vinux distribution gives one a choice of
speakup and several other alternatives, but it is based on
ubuntu11.10 which has the serious sound problems that stop middle-aged
P.C.'s so it is not an alternative right now.

Martin McCormick