Luke said: While making a tarball would be easy, the person using it would have to be sure they had the libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 shared library, which is from gcc 2.95. Luckily, Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora still carry this, but I doubt very much whether other distros do, and it would certainly not be trivial to build it. Doug adds: It's not trivial but it is doable. I have in fact done exactly that with the ibm tts in the past, both on LFS and slackware. It does take some considerable work, because we're talking raw guts of toolchain here. There various parts of toolchain of specific version that are known to work with specific versions of the other parts, like any given gcc will work with some version of binutils and glibc etc. But I can say it is doable and satisfying to get it done. It is also an opportunity to use the knowledge gained in LFS toolchain build to good use. It is even possible to actually have two different glibc versions on a system. I wish I would have kept specific notes on what I did, but oh well. Actually some of my notes may be in the archives of this list, I seem to recall posting at least some info about what I did to make it work. After changing distros, kernels, versions, etc so many times I gave up on ibm tts, but I really do love that product. It's a shame that ibm gave up on it, I recall an IBM engineer explaining that they spent millions on it and could not keep doing that for free. I think however that most of that work was on the recogniton part. The tts was tiny compared to the recognition engine and it was clear that their focus was on recognition. They were and are a bit out of touch because tts has much more direct useful application while the recognition was not worth it for me, it was cool to play with but not accurate. It seems they have since shifted their efforts in two other directions instead of regular old linux, they focused on speech on embedded systems, and rolled their speech strategy into websphere, where they make gazillions of dollars selling to big enterprise. I suppose we should just be glad that linux work is still available. It was a strange idea how they did the tts, you could buy it .. or not. It was free but you could buy it! And they wondered why nobody did. Still chuckling over that. -- Doug
