Hello Folks. A while ago I posted on this list about some problems myself and my system admin were having with getting software speech up and working with slackware on a dell, and I'm happy to say the admin guy got everything straightened out with your help. (I'm just basically passing messages along, as I'm the guy with the crappy laptop who was bellyaching about not having a serial port, thus relying on software speech). anyway, as it stands right now, I have slackware 10 loaded on the laptop, and speakup with flite. Now the problem is the completely garbled sounds that flite is making, and we're having a hard time figuring out why. Below is a basic rundown of what he went through to get things to their current configuration, and in addition, in case it helps, the chipset for the soundcard is YMF753, the laptop is a Toshiba 2410 w9x, 1.9 GHz, 256 MB ram. the full specifications for it are at: http://www.toshiba.ca/web/specifications.grp?lg=en§ion=1&group=223&product=531&part=830 here is what the admin has to say: --------- Hi, Here are the important factors related to Linux, flite and the poor speech synthesis we are getting from flite. Linux kernel - 2.4.27 Device driver for sound - i8x0 Flite - configured with --enable-shared and --with-vox=cmu_us_kal16 arguments - compiled with gcc version 3.2.2 Modules Info ------------ According to info from web the modules that need to be loaded are: soundcore sound ac97 ac97_codec v_midi uart401 cmpci i810_audio Modules loaded at boot time included - soundcore ac97_codec i810_audio Modules I loaded using modprobe after boot - sound ac97 v_midi uart401 Modules I couldn't load - cmpci Sound Playback Info ------------------- Info of the web indicated that this chipset may not like 8-bit sound files so Flite was re-configured to include 16-bit sound files. However, the output from Flite remains unintelligible. Sound device driver plays back .au sound files fine. ---- On a better note, the admin has been keeping notes on what he's been doing, he's tried the install on a bunch of different systems (unfortunately they never had this problem), and when we get things up and running here, I can pass them along to anyone who is interested. thanks tons for the help. Lorne