I still wonder about the usb console in relation to speakup. The kernel already has support to direct console to usb rather than serial port, and has had this capability for a long time, yet we still can't use usb serial adapters with speakup because the code assumes hardware serial port. My understanding is that with usb serial console you may miss a bit of the initial boot messages, but I wonder how it might work if speakup was in user space and we could use usb serial adapters. We'd miss a few of the initial boot messages but enable more widespread use of speakup. One way or another this usb problem needs to be sorted out. I have heard it mentioned by someone, I forget who, that a hybrid solution might be the answer, some kernel space and some user. It could be argued that a lot of what happens with speakup is application code, and if the line was drawn between actual hardware drivers and application code then there would be better chance of getting speakup into the official kernel. And this, of course, would be the best thing to happen. If it was all in the kernel with no patches required then there would be none of this discussion about gentoo or ubuntu not supporting it. But presumably the whole thing would have to be re-written. I can think of another reason to do this hybrid idea, to enable getting speakup beyond x86 and into ARM for example. There is no ISA bus there and interrupts are completely different. If it was well engineered as hybrid, with a "port" being generically abstracted in the application code, then it would not matter if the actual port was ISA or PCI card or USB or firewire, or some other thing that hasn't been invented yet. I have an interim suggestion though. Couldn't one make a small root filesystem that loads speakup like as a rescue CD, but not a CD, on the hard drive, for those situations where the regular distro isn't speaking for whatever reason? If you always had a small partition like this bootable with speech then you could at least boot that and then fix your full fledged distro if need be. Also wondering if anyone has tried using chroot in this sort of way, booting minimal system with speech and then chrooting into the full system. -- Doug
