speakup todo?

[Littlefield, Tyler]

Hello all:
I'm trying to transfer, and applying for scholarships and all that I'd 
like to be able to make some contributions to projects that I can note.
I'm interested in learning more about kernel programming, and I figured 
I'd start by working on something I use almost daily. I'm curious then 
if there's some sort of todo or improvements speakup could have to it.
I'd also be curious if someone has thought about moving it to 
userspace--as far as I know, the only thing that we really need the 
kernel for would be hardware speech (and since serial ports are dying 
out that could be a dead point), and accessing the console directly. How 
easy would it be then, to have speakup run in userspace, but access a 
smaller cut-down version of itself in the kernel to provide the access 
to the console we need?
We could use sequence files and access the console through /proc. It 
could return a file of 2-byte chars, which I believe is how it works 
now--one byte is the color, and the other byte is the ascii value. The 
sequence file would just iterate over the console's lines. I'm also 
curious how we'd handle something like key presses like caps+u to move 
up a line etc.

If I'm way off here, I'd still like to help out if possible; is there a 
todo list around, or stuff people would like to see done? If there are 
people willing to answer questions from time to time in terms of the 
kernel programming, since that's something I've not done before, I'm 
game to start coding.

Another question is then, how do people catch panics? Since I'm not 
quite cool enough to write code that just works, I'm sure I'll be 
dealing with panics, but I can't see them on the console and usually 
it's when speakup goes boom anyway.

-- 
Take care,
Ty
http://tds-solutions.net
The aspen project: a barebones light-weight mud engine:
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He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dares not reason is a slave.