Are the days of hardware synths and speaking from boot numbered?

[covici at ccs.covici.com]

Two things here, you can usually get access to a serial port on most
even desktop motherboards -- they just don't bring out the port to the
back, but the header is there on the mb.  You can get a cable and
bracket to bring out the serial port to the rear of the machine in most
cases.

Also, if you are willing to compile your own kernel, you can have
hardware speech by a one line patch to speakup, even in recent kernels.

Tony Baechler <tony at baechler.net> wrote:

> Let me throw in my two cents here.  I just had a brand new server
> built in August from scratch.  One of my primary requirements was a
> serial port. Yes, I had no problem finding one.  The trick seems to be
> to look for a server motherboard.  I doubt if most assembly line
> desktops will come with them anymore because they aren't usually
> necessary, but from poking around on various sites while researching,
> there are still plenty of uses for serial ports in servers.  So, to
> answer part of your question, I don't think onboard serial ports are
> going away in the immediate future.  They will continue to be harder
> to find, but there are still plenty of old devices out there in the
> enterprise that need them.
> 
> To answer your second question, Debian Squeeze and the Squeeze live CD
> still support hardware speech.  They use kernel 2.6.32 and I was able
> to do a fresh install with my Trippletalk.  I had to spend many hours
> using the live CD to try to recover my files from a damaged hard
> drive.  I mostly did this with ssh, but I was still able to load the
> Speakup modules from the CD and I had speech at the console.  For the
> curious, just burn and boot the live CD as normal.  Press Enter when
> it spins down and wait for it to boot.  You won't get any beep or
> other feedback.  After about 30 seconds, run "sudo bash" to get to a
> shell.  Load the Speakup modules as normal.
> 
> To get to the subject of your message, it ultimately comes down to the
> kernel developers.  There are still some USB synthesizers out there,
> although software speech is now the popular trend.  I see very little
> practical need for hardware speech in the near future, but I wish it
> was still available in Wheezy.  I upgraded to Wheezy and kernel 3.2
> and lost my hardware speech.  I kept the 2.6.32 kernel to fall back on
> if necessary, but that isn't a perfect solution and doesn't help with
> the 3.2 initrd.  I don't see a practical way to get software speech in
> an initrd just due to the overhead of sound drivers and ESpeak.
> Wheezy does have software speech built into the installer and I can
> verify that it works.  I guess the ultimate advantage in ditching
> hardware speech is that there are a lot more desktops with speakers
> and supported sound devices than there are with serial ports, so
> anyone can plug in a USB stick and have a talking Linux with minimal
> hassle.  In the end, that's probably more important, as much as I
> really don't like giving up my good old hardware synthesizers.  It
> seems that most Windows users use software speech now as well.
> 
> In conclusion, if you're really determined to have hardware speech on
> a new box, it can be done with time and effort.  Then again, you can
> run DOS on most boxes too if you really want.  It's just a matter of
> time before the kernels change and you'll be stuck with software
> speech one way or the other.  Eventually, Squeeze won't be supported
> and you won't have the upgrade path available to Wheezy as you do now.
> For now, you can install Squeeze, upgrade to Wheezy and make sure to
> not install the 3.2 kernel.
> 
> On 12/11/2012 12:55 PM, Arthur Pirika wrote:
> > I think the subject pretty much speaks for itself. With serial synths, and
> > especially serial ports getting harder to find, with the only serials synths
> > still being made new are the venerable doubletalks, should work be ramped up
> > on getting software speech, somehow at kernel level? I know there was a
> > project working on this, but not much has been done on it for a while.
> > Related to this, I assume it's still possible to build speakup into the
> > kernel, although most distributions package speakup as modules, thereby
> > allowing messages from the moment of powerup?
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-- 
Your life is like a penny.  You're going to lose it.  The question is:
How do
you spend it?

         John Covici
         covici at ccs.covici.com