* John G. Heim [Wed May 07, 2025 at 12:00:58PM -0500]:
We've had a swspeak boot option in the past, but as nobody was using/testing that, it got dropped several years ago. But if we know that there are users out there who make actual usage of it, we should change that. :)
We'll figure something out and keep you in the loop! :)
I don't remember hearing about the swspeak option. I will admit that I sometimes was slow to test the accessibility features of each new release. Often, a development release would be announced and by the time I got around to testing it, it was already production. Sorry about that. But I always just checked if I could get speech after it was done booting. Which has always worked. I do try to test every release. You might recall that last fall I posted that the musical tone wasn't working. But it turns out it just wasn't working on one machine.
The swspeak boot option existed until 2011, so it's quite some time that passed since then. :)
And no worries about the testing, we had more active and also more inactive times ourselves. If we know whom to reach out and if maintenance isn't too much of a burden, we should be able to manage that. :)
BTW, the speakup developers tell me that you can't activate the speakup drivers on the Linux kernel command line unless they are compiled into the kernel. So that is never going to work. Well, you could compile the speakup drivers into the GRML kernel (instead of compiling them as loadable modules) but even I think that's a bit much. The main reason I don't think that is worth while is that nobody has a hardware synth any more. Well, I do but I'm very much not typical. Software speech would be way more useful to the vast majority of blind sys admins.
Ah ok.
Yeah, so if you could add a kernel parameter, similar to ssh=password, that enabled software speech during boot, then a blind sysadmin could use grml2iso to make a customized version that automatically started talking during boot. It would be like a dream come true for me.
Sure, let's get this done. :)
To clarify the situation: for *you* only "modprobe speakup" is relevant, or do you use any of the specific modules like speakup_dectlk?
Do *you* need anything other than just "modprobe speakup_soft" or alike to get it working/useful for your situation?
I don't know if you've ever had a crashed authentication server but it's not a good time to have to press a key at exactly the right time or to have to type exactly the right thing in order to get speech. I'll bet I typed modprove instead of modprobe (or speakup+soft instead of speakup_soft) a million times in my life when a key server was down. 100 professors and TAs can't log into their computers and I'm like, "Calm down, deep breaths. Slow but steady wins the race."
Hehe, I can very well imagine!
regards -mika-