Hugh, I'm not using debian, but the same techniques should apply. Before you worry about the startup script, you need to get it working by hand. 1. Bot with your speakup kernel and festival driver. I have a separate section in my lilo.conf so I can type in "festival" at the boot prompt to force speakup toload the usrdev driver. 2. Once you log in as root, you need to make sure your soundcard is functioning. Try playing a wave file or and mp3 to make sure you have sound enabled. 3. Make sure that the festival modules are in your path. My festival was built in /opt directory so I used the following command to fix the PATH variable. export PATH=/opt/festival/bin:$PATH 4. start the festival server as a background process. % festival_server & 5. If you don't get any error messages, your're probably ready to run middleware. % cd /path/to/middleware % ./middleware & If all goes well you should hear some speech. Give us a report. Chris
