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reader, speakup, to make it work with certain hardware speech synthesizers. I don't know how to get it into the actual kernel code and I haven't even tried yet. But the patch file can be downloaded here:

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http://www.math.wisc.edu/~jheim/downloads/patch-2012-03-06.patch

Thanks for the patch, could you by any chance try to get it applied upstream? We try to stay as close to upstream and Debian kernel as possible and we'd like to see improvements taking place there so it's not just the Grml users who can benefit from it. :)

The problem is that the kernel developers and the speakup developers cannot agree on how to fix the bug. Of course, I am neither a kernel developer or one of the speakup developers. The kernel developers want speakup rewritten but the speakup developers say that if they rewrote it the way the kernel people tell them to, it would lose critical functionality. For example, the very first thing the kernel developers said when I brought this up on the kernel list was that speakup should be a run-time system. Well, that showed an incredible lack of understanding of the purpose of speakup itself since it needs to be loaded at boot time in order to get boot messages. So some guys from the kernel development team and some from speakup got into a little debate, which, BTW, I say the speakup people won. On the other hand, I have to admit the speakup code is, well, it has problems.

I am still hoping to get the patch, perhaps a modified version of it, accepted into the kernel code. I got a run around just asking how it could be done though. If you examine my patch, all it does is ignore the return code from a kernel function call. But there is absolutely no way to get a successful return code from the function call. When I pointed this out, I got no response. Very frustrating.

Maybe it would fit into the speakup-tools package. John, are you familiar with reporting a bug within Debian using reportbug?

Yeah, But I already emailed the developer of that package and he said maybe it could go into the udev package. So I emailed the udev developer and he suggested I try to get it into speakup-tools. Well, actually, he didn't know the first thing about speakup but that's what he meant. Honestly, I think you guys on the grml team are victims of your own reasonableness. I come here with my suggestions because you folks seem to be the only reasonable people on the internet.

Alright... While thinking about this over the weekend, I had decided to just give up. But after composing this message, I think I will indeed give it another try with the kernel people. And you needn't bother with the udev stuff since that's useless w/o the kernel patch.