----- Original Message ----- From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca> Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 2:13 PM Subject: Re: speakup.synth= vs modprobe > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 03:06:54PM -0400, al Sten-Clanton wrote: >> Does this mean that, unlike with, say, Fedora 9 or the earlier versions >> of >> GRML, you can't have speakup available early in the boot process? > > Yes, you can have speakup loaded even before the root file system > comes up, if you're using an initrd which contains speakup built as > modules. Basically, the behavior would be as if speakup was built into > the kernel, except that speakup is built as modules in this case, and > the kernel doesn't need to be rebuilt to include speakup. Oh yeah, I never made that connection before. I always compiled speakup drivers as modules and then loaded them with the speakup.synth kernel parm. I never put any thought into whether I should put an m or a y in that box for compiling the drivers. It seemed to work just as well either way. But it didn't really. I was missing some boot messages. So that's why they went to initrd. I asked about that on a general linux list a few years ago and didn't understand the answers i got. I suppose there's lots of stuff that can go in there but for one thing, it allows the kernel to have access to would normally be in /lib/modules at a point before it can read the disk. Ah, now I get it. I really tricked myself though. I put a stock debian kernel on my PC at home and it came up talking. So I figured the speakup.synth parameter was still working. As it turns out, I had the module in /etc/modules too. So that's why it was loading it.
