Older Computers and New Speech Engines

[Martin McCormick]

Tony Baechler writes:
> No. I got the CD to work fine here with 256 MB of RAM. It was painfully
> slow and Orca didn't come up automatically, but it worked and I could use
> speech. My machine is older than yours, but it's a desktop.

	Even good laptops are touchy beasts. They have to do
lots of cutting-edge things to try to make the battery last and
the size be manageable. What I was actually hoping for was a
portable computer with speech that will run ssh and a RS-232
port so I can occasionally go to buildings on campus and work on
stuff that you can't get to any other way.

	GRML has a new distribution out but initially, it
reports that the sound card is missing. It's not missing but
Dell must have put it in a strange place in the memory map.

	Remember Oralux and the crowing rooster? It's the only
distribution that had no trouble finding the sound card in that
laptop. Trouble is, speakup goes in to that spelling mode when
serial data are received. I tried a PCMCIA card and a USB
converter. The USB converter was found but caused that spelling
mode. The PCMCIA card registers itself but kermit can't
understand the port number. Fortunately, this isn't something I
need to do every day, but it is sure nice when you can. The
quest continues.

Martin