Linux with Software Synth on Dell Enspiron2600 Laptop

[Martin McCormick]

Willem van der Walt writes:
> The last oralux is not that old, should most likely still do what you want
> it to.
> In terms of free software speech and limmited resources, nothing beats
>espeak.

	Thank you. I did get the current version of grml and am
trying to see if it is usable. It is frustratingly close to very
good except for that kernel preemption/spelling problem. For
anybody who isn't familiar with the problem, the speech starts
to work and then breaks in to painfully-slow spelling of e v e r
y w o r d. Some research turns up that it is a fairly common
problem and is caused by the kernel preempting the speech driver
to do other things. One of those other things is scrolling the
screen. I discovered by accident that if I issued a clear
command, the first big output such as that from ps or dmesg
would actually work very nicely until the screen filled up and
started scrolling. At that point, the spelling torture was back
with about 1 letter every second until you get tired or run out
of  time and hit the space bar to shut it up and put it out of
its misery.

	Some posters to the grml list have reported that
changing the nice number to -20 which is the highest priority
clears up the speech. I haven't found which process to renice
yet. I did try the speechdispatcher process with no change.

	It was kind of amusing that the problem is no different
on a 400-MHZ ten-year-old gateway with 64 megabytes of RAM and
this 5-year-old laptop with 256 megs and a 1-gig processor.

	I kind of hate to force the priority of the speech up to
the top since that may create some other monster that bites some
other time.

	I appreciate knowing about espeak in case grml can't be
practically made to work.

	Right now, I am booting off the live CD so my testing
has been kind of limited but I can mount the hard drive and see
all the Windows stuff just waiting to get zapped in favor of a
Linux file system.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group