Has anything Changed Recently in the Debian Speakup Kernel?

[Martin G. McCormick]

	Around February 23, I downloaded the latest Wheezy
netinstall disk and I could not get it to come up talking on a
system that currently has a slightly older version of wheezy.

	I noticed that the sound of the boot operation was
slightly different in that normally, you hear the drive seek as
it pulls in the boot sectors, etc, and then it takes off a bit
more when you type s and then Enter. You can hear it start to
make more noises immediately after typing the s and now it seems
to just sit there and eventually it speeds up, loads the rest of
the kernel and then dead silence after the CD motor powers down
in some seconds.

	I guess it is certainly possible that I have a bad disk
image so I am asking whether anything about the speakup boot has
just changed.

	The current wheezy installation talks just fine as long
as one doesn't try to start gdm3. It has never talked past a few
error messages when gdm3 is made to come on during booting.

	This particular system has never worked under gnome
except for very buggy performance under a ubuntu 9 a couple of
years ago. If this box ever finds a version of ubuntu or debian
that runs gnome with speech, I will eat my hat with ketchup. So
far, that has been a very safe statement to make and the cap is
tightly on the ketchup bottle.

Martin McCormick