A couple of years
ago I asked about this on the speakup list. I got a variety of responses, but
most people had either never gotten their Dec PC working, or it was working
perfectly and they had never experienced my problems.
Perhaps this list
might have a subscriber with some troubleshooting ideas.
Mine is a Dec PC2,
the second ISA card that digital designed. It's quite a bit smaller than
the original Dec PC.
I've downloadded the
dec_pc.tgz archive from the speakup site as the speakup documentation for 2.0
suggests. Since I hadn't gotten this working before, I this time compared it to
the actual contents of the dec_pc subdirectory in the speakup 2.0 source code.
The binary files were identical.
The binary files are
dtload, a Linux executable, along with dtpc.dic, kernel.sys, lts.exe,
ph.exe,and cmd.exe. I can't remember if there was also a user.exe, but anyway,
these looked like the files that come with the DecPC1 DOS
drivers.
I read through the
source, and though it isn't exactly filled with helpful comments, it appears to
be a simple replacement for the DOS dtload, and its purpose is to load
those other files in to the decPC card's onboard RAM.
Following the
directions in the README and speakup documentation, I stashed all these files in
/usr/local/lib/dec_pc and fixed the permissions. I edited the dec_pc.conf and
change the line
io=0x340
io=0x340
to io=0x250, since
my dip switches are set to use that I/o address and it works with the DOS
drivers on my machine using that address.
Next I tried running
dtload and got the error:
kernel already loaded.
I tried the -v and
the -t but though it did enter test mode and let me type, it didn't speak. The
-v reported attempts to load the files, but concluded with the familiar "kernel
already loaded".
I rebooted to my DOS
partition , and then from DOS, loaded the Dec PC2 drivers as if I were going to
use a DOS screen reader. They talked and I tested by echoing some output to
COM4.
Then using Loadlin
from DOS I booted linux and tried the dtload again. It still
said
kernel already loaded.
Next I replaced all
the lts.exe, dtpc.dic, kernel.sys, ph.exe, cmd.exe and user.exe files with their
dec PC2 equivalents. In other words, I overwrote the decPC1 files with the dec
PC2 files. I also put user.exe in that directory, since I'm sure the PC 2 needs
it but not sure the PC1 needed it.
I then rebooted,
straight in to linux, without DOS and tried running dtload again. I still got
the "kernel already loaded message. I double-checked that all the files were
listed in the correct order in the text file dec_pc.conf. By "correct" I mean
the order they are loaded by the DOS version of dtload.
Still it said
"kernel already loaded".
Last of all, now
using the files from my decPC2 DOS drivers disk, I rebooted to DOS. I first ran
the DOS drivers and tested that the PC2 was talking. I then booted from DOS in
to Linux using loadlin and tried dtload -t again.
This time it still
said "kernel already loaded" but it talked in test mode.
I repeated the tests
and it appears that the DOS drivers need to be loaded first. Or maybe the linux
dtload isn't doing a darned thing with the DOS drivers loaded. Anyway, if I boot
straight to linux it doesn't talk ever, but if I load DOS drivers first, it will
talk but only in test mode.
Finally, I tried
echoing the decpc keyword to the synth_name in /proc:
echo decpc
>/proc/speakup/synth
as the documentation
suggested and I also tried:
echo decpc
>/proc/speakup/synth_name
in case there was a
typo in the speakup documentation.
either way when I
cat /proc/speakup/synth_name, it still says none. I used ssh to control the
machine so I wouldn't need a working synthesizer for these
tests.
I had set up lilo
and loadlin to boot with the parameter speakup_synth=none to be sure there was
no confusion. But speakup never finds my dec pc2.
I can guess that
there might be three causes for my problem:
1 -- I don't have a
kernel with the decpc module. This is slackware 11.0's stock speakup.s kernel. I
am not experienced enough to tell whether the decpc module is available or not.
Maybe someone can help me figure out at least whether the module is
available.
2 -- Dtload was
never supposed to work with DecPC2. No matter what I try, if this is the
problem, the dec pc2 isn't going to work with speakup. Will it work with other
access solutions like emacspeak or yasr?
3 -- The
instructions left out a crucial step I still need to perform. I am an
intermediate level user, and there is much I still don't know how to do. But I
am good at following directions.
Any thoughts would
be appreciated.
--Debee
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