Linux with Software Synth on Dell Enspiron2600 Laptop

Jude DaShiell jdashiel at shellworld.net
Mon Aug 20 22:04:02 UTC 2007


It isn't a kernel preemption problem, the kernel is completely innocent. 
It's the software speech package itself that needs fixing and this was 
last discussed over on the speakup mailing list in May of 2007.



On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Martin McCormick wrote:

> 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
>
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