Hi all, Apologies if a duplicate of this appears, I sent it Sunday but it's not hit my inbox or the archives. I've been using Speakup on a single Linux machine for years, using CentOS 4.x and a Dectalk Express. This last means I've remained reasonably oblivious to the software speech machinery. In a recent international move however I've had a bunch of equipment die, including my main server and the aforementioned Dectalk among other items. So this gives me the opportunity to do some rationalization. Basically I want to Speakup-enable a Linux box which will have as a main part of its role to be a VMware Server host. Consequently I'm looking for a relatively stable OS, ideally one of the server variants out there. With only hardware synths to worry about this would be reasonably trivial as Speakup is my only dependency. But if I need to use software speech -- and especially with my preference for some commercial voices -- I need get speech-dispatcher and speechd-up working. This is where the server variants get tricky as they tend not to have any of this stuff in the main repositories, or indeed many of the dependencies. I just installed CentOS 5 in aVM to play with and it looked like this was going to turn into a major self-build activity. Ubuntu Server comes out of the box with no audio and I'm having a bear of a time getting that to work. So, anyone had success with either of the above or got other recommendations? I've got Debian 5 installing as I type and am musing on just using that booted to runlevel 3 as an interim solution at least. Basically I want a host OS where the upgrade cycle on dependent packages and kernels is relatively slow, with the server hosting many VMs extended uptime is important. Thoughts? Thanks, Garry
