Don't press enter. Wait for the three tones then wait for speech to happen. -- Jude <jdashiel at panix dot com> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." Ed Howdershelt 1940. On Tue, 26 Sep 2023, Linux for blind general discussion wrote: > I am sorry, but I have bad news. I downloaded the image, sent it > to a 32-GB usb card and tried it. The system immediately found > the EFI partition and played the 3 notes in ascending order > within 5 or 10 seconds after powering on. I pressed Enter and > waited and waited and waited, left the room for a few minutes, > came back, waited some more but that was the last sound. > > Later, it occurred to me that I might get it to talk if > there was a usb sound card since those devices are in common use > everywhere. > > I now had this lap top with a 4-port extender containing > a full-size keyboard and the 128-GB thumb drive that was the > target of the Linux installation so why not also plug in a usb sound > card. > > I did and slint found that card. This is a very good way > to set this part of the installation since the person doing the > install must respond. > > I did make several later tries and confirmed that this > lap top's native sound interface is like a lot of native sound > interfaces in that it is too proprietary for it's own good. > > One of my favorite items when doing this sort of thing is a > portable AM radio to more or less get an electroencephalogram of > whether the computer seems to still be alive. One tunes to a > blank spot near the low end of the AM band if there is no radio > station there and listens to the static that the circuitry in the > computer makes as it computes. > > If something is wrong and the computer locks up, the > crackle, pop, beep and squeak abruptly stop and there is nothing > but the hiss of the radio. > > The computer, in this case, doesn't lock up but slint > never sees a viable native sound interface to probe. I hear lots > of zips, pops squeaks and beeps of all kinds indicating that the > computer is still alive and well but not talking. Adding the usb > sound card gives slint something it can recognize as a sound > interface. It did start voicing the screen just like it should > but it should have found the native interface automatically. > > I have another Debian 11 distribution that uses the same > concept of sending an English message to every sound card asking > one to press enter if this is the correct card and it talks all > the time through the installation process. > > For now, I am using that installer since it is the same > debian version I wanted anyway which is bullseye or debian 11. > > That install image does find the HP lap top's native > sound interface. When the installation is complete, it has > produced some unpleasant surprises on other systems I have used > it on if their native sound cards were particularly complex. One > system, for instance, talked all the way through the installation > but wouldn't reliably talk after booting to the installed system. > Simply unplugging the speaker or plugging in a set of headphones > would kill the audio. It turned out to think that hdmi was > supposed to be the correct output. > > If this helps any, this lap top appears to have no > trouble sending the musical notes at the boot time. The oldest > PC's had a system for making noises which you are probably very > familiar with which used a timer-counter integrated circuit that > was fed from a roughly 1-MHZ clock. The 16-bit counter in the > chip is fed with some constant depending upon what note or pitch > one needs. There is also a gate which connects pure DC to the > speaker or nothing if we are on the low half of the cycle. Tones > are produced by stuffing this constant in to the counter and the > counter counts down to 0 and then restarts after sending a pulse > to the speaker. > > You can get an amazing number of noises out of such a > circuit from Morse Code to at least video-game quality music. > > I am guessing this lap top has some modern version of > that noise-maker timer-counter-switch in order for the music to > come through but obviously, we need to find the built-in sound > card for speech to work. > > I am certainly not complaining about slint. As one who > likes to tinker with computers, PIC microcontrollers and radios, > I know how difficult it is to make just about anything work over > the broad range of situations that public users produce so, if > there is any information I can provide to help, I am glad to do > so. > > Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > Hi Martin, > > > > sorry for the mistake in the Handbook. Of course I should have written: > > > > wget https://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-15.0/iso/slint64-15.0-5.iso > > wget > > https://slackware.uk/slint/x86_64/slint-15.0/iso/slint64-15.0-5.iso.sha256 > > > > then: > > sha256sum -c slint64-15.0-5.iso.sha256 > > > > I will fix that and/or make a link like slint64-15.0-latest.iso > > > > Cheers, > > Didier > > _______________________________________________ > Blinux-list mailing list > Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list > > _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list