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

[Michael Prokop]

* 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-
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