Speakup not in Ubuntu 13.04

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

So, as some of you might have seen if you're on the 
ubuntu-devel-announce list, beta 1 of 13.04 has been released.  Just out 
of curiosity, I thought I would give the cloud image a try.  Even though 
it's for the cloud, it still uses the "generic" kernel, which is the 
default shipped with Ubuntu.  They eliminated the server flavor.  While 
I was there, I was wondering if Speakup is still included in staging.

The short answer is that no, Speakup is not in the latest Ubuntu 13.04 
beta.  Hopefully it will make the final release, but I doubt it.  It 
isn't in staging and isn't included by default, but can be built from 
source.  This is with generic kernel 3.8.0 on x86-64.  There are, 
however, two Speakup packages available.  One is called "speakup" and 
the other is "speakup-source."  They are both version 3.1.5 of Speakup, 
but one builds the modules with DKMS and one with debhelper and 
module-assistant.  Installing either package brings in a lot of extra 
dependencies, such as a full build environment.  I went ahead with the 
"speakup" package as it had fewer dependencies than "speakup-source."  
It wouldn't build.  At first, it was a simple problem and required 
installing the "python-apport" package.  However, even after that, it 
still wouldn't build and complained about a missing file.  The file was 
serialio.h or similar and is apparently part of the kernel source.  I 
didn't spend a lot of time trying to track down the missing packages, 
but I reached the conclusion that one wouldn't easily get Speakup 
working on a stock Ubuntu install.

Also while I was there, I looked at Orca.  They are shipping 3.7 with 
Firefox 19.0.  I couldn't figure out the exact version of Gnome, but the 
"gnome-shell" package is at 3.6.  I don't know how accessible Gnome 3.6 
is, but it appears that 13.04 will ship with it.

I hope this information is helpful and hopefully someone can push Ubuntu 
to include Speakup back into the final 13.04 kernel.