Speakup and VMWare

[Monty Lilburn]

Hello All,

I am running Windows XP via VMPlayer on top of a Debian distro with 
Speakup compiled into a 2.6.18 kernel.  (straight in, not as modules)  I 
am using Speakup with a Dectalk Express attached to /dev/ttyS0.

What I would like to do is get the Window-Eyes running on the Windows XP 
working with the dectalk express.

Since Speakup completely takes over and locks /dev/ttyS0,
I successfully managed to set up a virtual serial port on the virtual 
machine that pointed to /proc/speakup/synth_direct  on the host machine 
(Debian running Speakup)  I thought for a moment that by doing this I 
could then get Window-Eyes to use the Dectalk Express.  Unfortunately this 
didn't really work.  Setting Window-Eyes to use any serial hardware synth 
other than the Dectalk Express  does result in speech mixed with synth 
codes being spoken by the Dectalk.  When I  set Windo-Eyes to use the 
Dectalk Express, no speech at all happens.  I'm guessing this may have to 
do with flow-control or some setting that I would need to play with to get 
working.

The other reason this method won't work now that I think about it is 
because the synth_direct device is defaulted to only be writable which 
implies to me that it isn't readable and there for things like indexing 
won't work.

Does anyone know of a better way to achieve my objective of being able to 
fully access the serial port  attached to the Dectalk express?  Is there a 
speakup device or work around that will allow this to happen?

Thanks in advance,

   Monty