I have written a simple script to select a keymap based on whether Speakup is running or not before. What I did is to grep "none" /proc/speakup/synth. If it contains "none" I would execute "loadkeys -k." This loads the default keymap. I don't have this script handy, but I recall that it went something like: grep "none" /proc/speakup/synth >/dev/null 2>&1 if [ $? -eq 0 ] then loadkeys -k fi I put this at the bottom of /etc/rc.d/rc.local on the machine in question. Hope this helps.