Speakup Issues

[John G. Heim]

How does a serial console work? If you can configure a serial console, why can't you configure a serial speech synthesizer? Or does the kernel team have problems with serial consoles too?

How does a serial terminal work?


On Mar 29, 2013, at 4:59 PM, William Hubbs wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:11:33PM -0600, William F. Acker WB2FLW +1-303-722-7209 wrote:
>> Someone is probably going to launch an ICBM at my house for asking this 
>> question, but, I wonder if we could ditch serial support. Maybe that could 
>> be run in user space, and the rest could go into mainline. Do you know if 
>> it's just the serial stuff they have a problem with?
> 
> Well, the serial code definitely has issues.
> 
> For those who don't know, the issue with speakup's serial code is that
> we bypass the kernel's serial port drivers and write directly to the
> hardware serial ports.
> 
> This is not good because we have to hard code the ports to write to into
> the speakup code. Also it means that our code doesn't work with all
> types of serial ports that the kernel supports.
> 
> In order to fix this, it would take working with the serial driver
> maintainer in the kernel, at least, and a major rewrite of speakup's
> serial code.
> 
> The fastest way to take care of this probably would be to write a daemon
> which runs in user space. This daemon would act like espeakup, in the
> sense that it would read the /dev/softsynth device, but it would send
> output to  a serial (or even usb) device that the kernel knows about, e.g.
> /dev/ttyS0.
> 
> I have been working on a usb device driver for the tripple talk for a while;
> I should get back to finishing that.
> 
> The disadvantage of this of course is that hardware synthesizers then
> would be subject to the same limitation as the software synthesizer; you
> would have to wait until some point in the boot process when a daemon
> could be started before speech would start. I think hardware speech
> could start up pretty early; probably around the same time as brltty.
> 
> another issue right now is that when data is sent to the software
> synthesizer, on an smp machine, data gets randomly dropped. If you
> review the screen everything is there as it should be, but when the data
> is initially sent to the synthesizer, parts of it do not get read.
> 
> This hasn't been fixed, because it is extremely difficult to debug and
> reproduce.
> 
> Another question is that we still have drivers for old internal ISA
> synthesizers, such as the doubletalk pc, dectalk pc, accent pc and
> keynote pc. Are these being used? is it even possible to find a machine
> any more that supports ISA slots?
> 
> William
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at linux-speakup.org
> http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>