Hi all: I had the same problem that some of you were discribing with the software speech and speakup. The speech was extremely choppy and hard to understand. Kirk said on another posting that the problem was a kernel configuration option called "Preempt The Big Kernel Lock". This option is found in kernels 2.6.10 and 2.6.11. I recompiled the kernel on my desktop without this option and speech improved, but I did not want to recompile on my laptop, so I started playing with other things. I fixed the problem by changing the priority of my "speechd_up" and of "speech-dispatcher". I am running "speechd_up" with priority 5 and speech-dispatcher with priority -5 and it works wonderfully. I think my speech is more responsive than it ever has been. Of course I have no idea why the changed priority helps with this problem, but it does. HTH David B.
