For reasons I am unclear on people seem to be alergic to initial ramdisks in modern Linux distributions. The reason initial ramdisks are used in modern distributions is so that you can load modules required for boot devices, allow time for USB devices to settle before using them. An initrd allows boot from raid and lvm, it also gives you a recovery environment in ram that does not rely on your disk systems. It also allows partitions to be identified by uuid which will allow drives to change ids without the system becoming unbootable. I seem to recall that kernel-package expects to build initial ram disks and unless you bypass the build machinery it might not be easy to switch off. Once speakup integrates more seamlessly into Debian and it's getting better all the time then kernel package will be something worth sticking with for speakup. I doubt it is the initrd that is preventing your large screens; you need to pass the option to the kernel as part of grub configuration and then run update-grub to copy it through the rest of the file. I might look harder into this on the holidays although I run ubuntu not Debian. Regards, Kerry. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Holmes" <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 9:59 PM Subject: Re: Kernels in Debian > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: RIPEMD160 > > Thanks Tony for that good summary of steps. I also looked around in > the /usr/share/doc/kernel-package (I believe it's called) and there > was a good write-up there too. Your steps confirmed my observation > about where to put the speakup/*.ko modules. I found out the hard way > I had to mv them down to the speakup directory. I would have thought > the 'make modules_install' would have done this directly. > > I'll have to read up on modules-assistent. I didn't do anything in > that area yesterday and speakup is working for me. I did install the > kernel headers; I'll have to take stock of the kernel stuff I did > install but I had not untarred the source tree yet. I'm currently > satisfied with using modules right now. I may eventually go with a > strait kernel with one speakup module included and bypass initrd > completely. Personally, I wonder about the usefullness of a initrd on > a large desktop of my own. I suppose those are good for smaller > systems where decisions have to be made as to which modules to > include. > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) > > iEYEAREDAAYFAkj94CoACgkQWSjv55S0LfFHvwCfa/CpPrWx7BzBkbBbNVXDyIsI > COAAoOQrz4rtNQdQM8H/CMv0EaJpe+VP > =m7u6 > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup >
