On 
Sat, 25 Aug 2007, cody wrote:

> > what I don't get is why I have to type .s rather than .i, because my drives
> > are ide, not scsi as mentioned in the instructions, and am not even sure why
> > that has anything to do with the price of meat to begin with..

    Speakup was compiled into the SCSI kernal for two reasons.  1) It saves space on the installation CD-ROMs, and 2) Today's CD/DVD-RW drives are being run under SCSI emulation to prevent crashing and/or disk-write errors when the system is overly busy, which is a common occurance on IDE setups.  This is because, unlike IDE, SCSI can actually do more than one disk-write at the same time.  They're even trying this method in Mickey...er. Microsoft Windows so DVDs can get properly written once in a while.

    Anyway, they haven't updated the speakup installation instructions yet to reflect the new practice.  The speakup.i kernal won't be found on the install CD.  I've looked, since it's a common practice to put installation instructions on the install CD, in just about every distro out there, and the speakup readme file was written for Slackware v8 or something.  Once you have the sucker installed, edit your /etc/lilo.conf file, looking for a line saying:

append=

...and edit it to say:

append="speakup_synth=dtlk"

...and run lilo to reflect the change.  That way you won't have to type the thing in every time you boot the computer.

PS: I wish some of you guys would edit your replies and remove .the 50-odd messages. posted in their entirety,  following the two cents that you've added.  It's very frustrating having to listen to it all over again for no reason, especially threads like this one, which have four or more long replies being reposted over and over again.  Sorry for the rant.

PPS: Has anyone heard of plans to make quoted text in emails be spoken in alternate voices?  It sure would be nice to have quoted text sound different than the reply text.  Maybe a python script in JAWS?  TIA,

        Michael