Hello friends: I built a kernel as instructed at: http://users.wpi.edu/~blinux/installation_instructions.txt Festival is working, gives me a festival> prompt, but typing text for it to synthesize at the prompt gives me nothing. An lsmod indicated that I have no sound modules loaded. (Booting with Knoppix loaded cs4232, ad1848, uart401, sound and soundcore). An ls *.o while in the /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound directory indicates that I have soundcore.o, but none of the others that Knoppix used. Running esdplay /usr/share/sounds/*.wav returns an error: /dev/dsp: No such devise Running ls -l /dev/dsp returns: crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 3 Mar 14 2002 /dev/dsp I ran that as root, but hesco, my own user is a member of the audio group. The instructions final few lines read: >Then see what major number was given and create an appropriate entry in /dev. How would I do this? An ls -l /dev/usrdev indicates ls: /dev/usrdev: No such file or directory >% mknod /dev/usrdev c 252 0 > >Note that the major/minor numbers are currently hardcoded in at compile >time. To change the major number being used just change >CHAR_REQUESTED_MAJOR_NUMBER in speakup_usrdev.h hesco at biko:~$ locate speakup_usrdev.h /usr/src/linux-2.4.20/drivers/char/speakup/speakup_usrdev.h /usr/src/speakup-1.5/speakup/speakup_usrdev.h These are files left over from previous attempts to compile Speakup. The speakup_usrdev.h file in the tree I just built says that variable is 252, so I ran the mknod command given above and now see it showing up in the ls command. >Finally (and optionally, but reccommended) add the festival server and >middleware program to your init scripts and when you reboot your computer >should start talking right away. My Debian /etc/init.d directory already had a festival shell script, in which I commented out the "exit 0" line, since the comments indicated that that would automatically start Festival at startup. I'm assuming that middleware refers to: /usr/src/speakup_1.5/middleware/middleware a binary file which does not execute when I attempt to invoke it, giving me the following error: Failed to open file: No such device which may very well be related to the sound problems I'm having. My questions related to this are: Is this the correct middleware to invoke in my init.d scripts? I searched in vain among the Sound menu in make menuconfig to find the cs4232 module for the CS4236B chip which is installed on my motherboard. Where can I find what I need? How can I get it built into the kernel? What am I missing here that is keeping me from running speakup? As always, all help appreciated. -- Hugh Esco P.S. On the brighter side, I have existed without sound or ethernet (including samba networked cups printing) since my last attempt to build speakup, when late one night / early the next morning, apparently bleary-eyed, I somehow messed up my working kernel and was left with a crippled machine. I used Tom's RTBT to fire it back up, rebuild a bootable but featureless kernel and get back in. While I still have not worked out this sound issue, apparently, I now have this machine accepting connections across the ethernet, again. So this kernel wasn't a complete loss. Still I'm eager to get the sound working. -- HE