On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Prasad Chaturvedula wrote: > Sure Emacspeak will work with SB16. My system has an SB16. > The drivers for SB16 are already there in the kernels so > there is no problem. If you are interested in using a > software synth like Viavoice, make sure you have atleast > 32Mb RAM on your system. Will this perform passably on his 486 DX4/100? I know that the recommendations are for a pentium class machine running something like 200MHz or better, but this may assume the GUI is running. Even a very low end 486 can handle a text interface with ease, with power left over. So can soft speech work with less power, when there is no GUI? Note that the power of the machine is not a problem with a hardware synth -- see my comments, inserted in the original message below, for an alternate suggestion: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jeff Dubois" <ah147@freenet.carleton.ca> > To: <blinux-list@redhat.com> > Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2002 00:57 > Subject: linux and speech > > Recently, I went through the tickle trunk and discovered I > > had enough spare parts to build an old 486 DX4/100 out of the .... [ended up installing Mandrake] > > (In part this had to do with the newer releases of Linux > > being optimized for Pentium installation.) Heh, Mandrake is known for being the first to optimize for the Pentium. So it might run a bit slower on your hardware than otherwise (probably not noticeably). ... > > In any event, my next step is speech access on the machine. > > > > I have a small LAN here consisting of a DOS 6.22 machine, a > > Win98 SE machine and, most recently, a Linuxbox. May we assume that these other machines have more power? ... > > If it would be best to drive a dedicated synthesizer, do they > > sell a type of Y connection so that I may run a single device > > (the DoubleTalk) off both the DOS and Linux machines? Why not just put the DoubleTalk on your Linux machine, and run your DOS 6.22 as a task under Linux, through dosemu? You could even eventually use your present DOS machine (if it has more power), for your Linux setup (with dosemu). And you could upgrade your DOS to Dr-DOS (see calderasystems.com -- I got mine for free there, bundled with their dosemu package). You would want to configure dosemu so that it ran only in text mode (this might be the default when accessed through a serial port). Be aware that configuring dosemu for acceptable use in a character based mode might take some patience and experimentation, especially in the sense of character sets (somewhat terminal dependent -- vt100 emulation might be the place to start). There is a character set made just for this purpose, if I recall -- been a while. Or get a good configuration from someone here that already has been through this. And you could have the machine dual boot for native DOS, for apps that don't behave well with a text interface. After a while you will no doubt find, like most others, that you can do everything better in linux, and DOS will fall into disuse (many ditch it altogether). So then what do you do with the old 486? You could get one of the little floppy or CD based firewall linux distributions and use it for a dedicated DMZ gateway firewall connection to the internet (and it would be overpowered for that -- but who cares, when using an old out-of-the-closet refurbished machine). Or use it for an extra GUI X-terminal connected to your main linux machine, for the use of family members (playing games or surfing the web, etc). See the "network for peanuts" series on linuxworld.com for details. LCR -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html