Hi Duane: You're doing the right stuff. /etc/speakup.conf is not needed, and is in fact only of any use if you have loadspk and point it at it. And its use has now been depricated. Speakup will use sensible defaults. Speakup 0.10A had trouble detecting some synths. I'd suggest running the checkout script that's with speakup 0.10A on a fresh kernel tree and compile the latest CVS, as a number of changes have been made, one of which was synth detection. Geoff.