Hello all, I have pulled much of what I have done here from threads on this list but then I took a few leaps of faith on my own to get to a goal that has only very recently come into focus. I will now explain. I started with Ubuntu 8.04 and just recently upgraded to 8.10. Then I opened a shell session with gnome-terminal. Then I tried a variant on Kerry's instructions to get speakup working. I built speakup as suggested, successfully. Since I am using a DECTalk, I skipped the espeakup and did the modprobe and specified speakup_dectlk instead of speakup_soft. It told me that it worked. But then it was silent until I shut the computer down. Then it talked while the computer was going down. I had hoped that it would come up talking , even if only up to the login prompt, But it didn't. Then I connected using ssh and had similar results when I did the modprobe command. Then I saw the thread from just a few days ago about grml. I downloaded and created the CD, found and read over the cheat sheet and attempted to boot with it and specified grml speakup_synth=dectlk. I couldn't get that to work. All I am trying to do now is get something to work with speakup. I like the idea of a live CD That would allow me to get the best of the command line interface when I want it while allowing me to have the gnome environment. I feel like I am close to it but I am apparently missing one or more steps. Any thoughts are welcome. Thanks! Bruce Noblick
