Hi all,
It's been a long time in coming, but the ISO images and RPM
repository for Speakup Modified Fedora 9 have been updated. First, the
problems. On Fedora, Starting with the 2.6.26 kernels, there's a nasty
bug connected to the soft synthesizer driver. If the driver is loaded,
and there's no synthesizer to take the output, the machine will lock up.
The workaround is to run a script that loads the soft synth driver and
immediately starts the synthesizer. I understand that not all machines
suffer from this problem. Next, the fix that makes sure that serial ports
are recognized in the same order whether or not Speakup is loaded does a
number on the Dectalk Express and friends. It's an interaction with HAL
Daemon which causes the Dectalk to hesitate for about three seconds every
time a key is pressed. The workaround for this is to keep HAL from
running. As root, do: chkconfig haldaemon off I don't know what the
consequences are of not running HAL. For those who must have it, the last
2.6.25 kernel is posted at
ftp://ftp.speakupmodified.org/speakupmodified/fedora/9/Fedora/.
Now for the good stuff. Since the last update on Aug 12, there have
been about 2GB of updates. And we've done some work to address our unique
needs. A patched version of xulrunner is included that fixes the bug with
Orca finding firefox to be inaccessible on x86_64 systems. We now install
braille support for Orca by default along with espeak and tiresias fonts.
Now, we can focus on F10. I've successfully rebuilt and updated the
f10 beta. As I write a batch of 32bit kernels with Speakup included are
being built.
If anyone has questions, they can post here or call me at the number
at the top of this message, or at sip:3890 at octothorp.org.
--
Bill in Denver
