It has become quite popular to play with these settings since Frank discovered them a few days ago. You all may have noticed that you need to be root to make changes to these settings. The reason for that, and there is a reason, is that they can fuck up your system big time if you're not careful. The common consensus is well okay sometimes they may hang my system and I'll have to reboot; well they can have much more violent reactions than that. If they are set to far a field they can infact currupt your file system. Okay you've been warned. Let's just get the functions of these variables straight. Delay_time is the amount of time that speakup goes to sleep after sending characters to the synth. Speakup sends out jiffy_delta worth of characters before going to sleep for delay_time. Speakup does not start talking to the synth until trigger_time worth of characters have been sent to the buffer. Trigger_time is a one-shot in that it doesn't get set again until the buffer has been cleared. Jiffy_delta is the amount of time speakup holds the kernel while sending characters to the synth. A word about these values, delay_time, trigger_time and full_time are in miliseconds. Jiffy_delta is in ten milisecond increments. So a trigger_time of 50 is the same as five jiffies. Jiffies are the basic scheduling increment of Linux on 32-bit processors they are ten miliseconds. On systems such as alphas and sparcs they are one milisecond. The higher jiffy_delta is the longer you hold the processor. This wouldn't be bad except that we're talking multitasking here, so what you take someone else doesn't get in any given time period. We can go into a rather indepth discussion about interrupts and all that but I'd rather save that for the reflector if anyone is interested. The bottom line is you grab to much time and you'll have a totally fucked file system, network layer and who knows what else. So be careful. The default values are not optimal because of the amount of time I have to spend with each synth. Some drivers I never even have the synth to test with. We have already incorporated some of the new values that people like Frank and Bill have come up with. Over time we will hopefully be able to tune all the different synths. I just want you to know what you are dealing with if you are going to muck about. I was worried because it looks to me as if you didn't know what these values are for Chris. So you've all been warned. If you fuck your systems over don't even bother mentioning it to me. meanwhile happy tuning. If you get better values for your synths please post them to the list and on the reflector. Kirk -- Kirk Reiser The Computer Braille Facility e-mail: kirk at braille.uwo.ca University of Western Ontario phone: (519) 661-3061
