Around February 23, I downloaded the latest Wheezy netinstall disk and I could not get it to come up talking on a system that currently has a slightly older version of wheezy. I noticed that the sound of the boot operation was slightly different in that normally, you hear the drive seek as it pulls in the boot sectors, etc, and then it takes off a bit more when you type s and then Enter. You can hear it start to make more noises immediately after typing the s and now it seems to just sit there and eventually it speeds up, loads the rest of the kernel and then dead silence after the CD motor powers down in some seconds. I guess it is certainly possible that I have a bad disk image so I am asking whether anything about the speakup boot has just changed. The current wheezy installation talks just fine as long as one doesn't try to start gdm3. It has never talked past a few error messages when gdm3 is made to come on during booting. This particular system has never worked under gnome except for very buggy performance under a ubuntu 9 a couple of years ago. If this box ever finds a version of ubuntu or debian that runs gnome with speech, I will eat my hat with ketchup. So far, that has been a very safe statement to make and the cap is tightly on the ketchup bottle. Martin McCormick
