Compiling Speakup modules

[Tony Baechler]

Hi all,

I've just been doing some poking around in the kernel sources and I see that 
Speakup is in staging.  A mention of this on the web site would be helpful 
since I thought, based on what the site says, that it's still in the old git 
repository and was disappointed to see that none of the code had been 
updated in years.  Anyway, someone is having a problem with the DECtalk 
dropping pitch randomly.  While I can't reproduce it here, I see that 
speakup_dectlk.c has a line to drop the pitch to 100, so presumably changing 
it to 120 would fix the problem.

My question is this:  Once I make the change, how do I recompile the Speakup 
modules?  Do I have to compile a new kernel from scratch?  I really don't 
want to build a new kernel just for a single line change.  If I can't just 
build Speakup, can I only build the staging drivers?  I see a Makefile in 
the Speakup source, but it looks like it won't work by itself.  I read the 
README in staging, but it talked about compiling everything.  I am not a 
programmer and I'm not sure where to look.  The kernel README said to look 
at the Changes file, but that isn't in the staging tree.  I fear I have to 
download a full kernel release and do a full compile.  Is this correct?

Finally, how do you get hardware speech working on kernels after 2.6.32?  I 
know of someone running 3.16 and he says it works, but I just installed 4.0 
from Debian testing and it appeared to lock up the machine when I loaded the 
speakup_dectlk module.  This is the linux-image-686 metapackage.  How can I 
get around this and use official Debian kernels?

Thanks very much for your help.

--------------------
Tony Baechler, Baechler Access Technology Services
Putting accessibility at the forefront of technology
mailto:bats at batsupport.com
Phone: 1-619-746-8310   Fax: 1-619-449-9898