Help with serial synths in 4.X kernels

[Tony Baechler]

Hello all,

This is probably for Samuel, but I thought I would ask here in hopes that 
others might have suggestions. I'm trying to compile 4.X kernels 
(specifically 4.3.3) with working serial synth support, but so far no luck. 
I've seen several patches posted here by Samuel, but I don't know if they've 
been accepted into staging. I pulled a recent staging snapshot and copied 
the speakup directory over that supplied with kernel 4.3.3 in Debian. The 
kernel didn't compile, giving an error that screen_pos is undefined. I 
copied main.c from the 4.3.3 source which fixes the problem, but loading the 
speakup_dectlk module results in silence. It seems that it still won't 
access the serial port, even if I include ser=0 on the command line. I also 
tried applying John's patch to the vanilla 4.3.3 sources. Again, it 
compiled, but loading speakup_dectlk locked up the machine. I tried 
4.4.0-trunk-amd64 from Debian without success.

Is there a diff with all of the Speakup patches posted to date which I can 
apply to the kernel sources? Is there any chance that Debian will pick up 
these patches soon since they apparently haven't made it to the official 
staging tree? Am I missing something obvious? Samuel, would you please post 
a file with all of your patches so far in a central location to make them 
easier to find?

For the record, John's build instructions don't work on recent kernels. I've 
found that the following steps seem to work better:

1. Install the "linux-source" and "make-kpkg" packages.

2. Change to /usr/src/ which should have a tar.bz2 or tar.xz file with the 
source. Extract the source which should create a linux-source-X.Y.Z directory.

3. Change to linux-source-X.Y.Z.

4. As root or with sudo, run the following:

make-kpkg --initrd buildpackage

Note that on Ubuntu, you'll run into problems with .config missing. Debian 
packages don't seem to have this problem, but to be safe, copy a config.* 
file to .config in the linux-source directory. Apply any Speakup patches 
before running make-kpkg. On an Intel I7 with 32 GB of memory, the build 
process takes about three hours and builds several .deb packages.


-- 
Tony Baechler, founder, Baechler Access Technology Services
Putting accessibility at the forefront of technology
mailto:bats at batsupport.com
Phone: 1-619-746-8310  SMS text: 1-619-375-2545