[Grml] Customizing GRML to start speech as early as possible

[John G. Heim]

> 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! :)
>
> regards
> -mika-
>

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.

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.

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. 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."


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