Hi. I just wanted to make anybody who uses Slackware, and is planning to upgrade to Slackware 12.2 aware of a nasty conflict between Speakup and the HAL daemon (AKA hald.) After I installed Slackware 12.2, and rebooted, Speakup came up with incredibly slow response times! It took up to 5 seconds to respond to any key press. This is with a Dectalk USB in serial mode, so it emulates a Dectalk Express. Since this did not happen on the install CD, I did some tests, and eventually found out that this didn't happen if I removed the execute bit on /etc/rc.d/rc.hald. This prevents the HAL daemon from starting up at boot time. As long as it isn't running, Speakup will respond normally. So far as I know, only X applications use this daemon to automount CD ROMs and other removable disks when they are inserted. So, as long as you don't run X, this should be OK. Has anybody else ran into this problem? Or, is it a bug specific to Slackware?
