Help with serial synths in 4.X kernels

[John G Heim]

You should check the syslog. There are almost certainly messages in 
there reporting what is happening. I'll try to compile 4.3 kernels for 
ubuntu and debian over the next few days. I had planned to automate the 
process. Every time my ubuntu machines download a new kernel, generate a 
new patched kernel package. I never got around to it though. I was using 
a sed command to comment out the line that caused serial synths to not 
work so that automation was possible. Part of the problem here is that I 
have kind of given up on serial synths myself. I have been depending 
more and more on the combination of a braille display and software 
speech.  It seems to me that using a hardware speech synth is going 
against the grain these days.
02/23/2016 07:45 AM, Tony Baechler wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> his 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.
>
>