The Dectalk drivers are not broken. It's the probing for the serial port that is the problem. In the case of Slackware 12.0, which uses 2.6.21.5, it is necessary to pass the serial port on the command line. For example, "speakup_synth=dectlk speakup_ser=0" would be right for a Dectalk Express on /dev/ttyS0. So, try this with Fedora and others using 2.6.21.X kernels.
