Oralux Installation Observations

[Martin McCormick]

	Here are some observations from my recent installation
of Oralux with software speech on a laptop.

	First, in my opinion, software speech on a live CD is
one of the best ways to get around that initial problem we have
of needing to know what is going on during the installation
phase.

	The introductory documentation with Oralux says that the
installation procedure is still preliminary and that was dead
right.

	In my case, I had to manually do the fdisk formatting
portion of the process because knoppix-installer never liked
what it saw even though fdisk successfully set up the swap and
ext3 partitions and did a bad-block test which showed clean.

	The knoppix-installer man page has a rather dangerous
suggestion for skipping the format tests which is to run
knoppix-installer with a special environment variable set.  What
did I have to loose? so I did it.

	It ran with a couple of bunches of "no such file" errors
and then said that it had successfully completed with no
errors. Go figure. It may have been that it was looking for a
directory of files, didn't find it, and fixed the problem on its
own.

	Anyway, the moment of truth came and I rebooted.

	After some hard disk activity, there was dead silence.
This next action might seem odd to some of you, but I got a
portable AM radio and put it near the computer and then typed a
blind login to my user ID along with the password. When
successful, there is a burst of static from the radio. If
unsuccessful, there is maybe a little pop, but nothing like the
several variations one hears in the noise.

	I could tell that I was logged in so I then su -'d to
root and listened for that little set of changes.

	One thing I noticed was that the Caps-lock key was
behaving like it does under speakup so that was a good sign. In
speakup, you must hold Shift down before hitting Caps-lock.

	To condense a whole evening's worth of frustration in to
a short story, I mounted a floppy disk and did a ps ax command
piped to a file on the diskette and then put that diskette in to
another Linux system to read it back.

	Speech-dispatcher was running but none of the other
speech processes were.

	I found an info file about speechd-up and it solve the
mystery.

	It seems that when you install Oralux, it comes up not
working and you have to tell it what synthesizer to use like one
must do when booting from the CDROM.

	The speechd-up info file tells you how to test
speech-dispatcher, speechd-up and how to set the softsynth
device to come to life by echoing sftsyn to
/prock/speakup/synth_name.

	After reading all that, I tried it and discovered that
all were actually working.

	The info documentation tells you what general steps to
take to make speechd-up run just after speech-dispatcher starts.
If you look at the scripts in /etc/rc2.d, you will notice that
they have names like S20speech-dispatcher and many others. That
number sets the order of startup. Any script whose number is
higher than 20 in this case, will not run until all the scripts
with 20 in their name have run. The info documentation says that
speechd-up must not start until speech-dispatcher has started so
I named the speechd-up script S25speechd-up.

	For some reason, that script and the script to start
sshd are being skipped when I boot but I don't think that is a
speech-related problem at all.

By the way, speakup and software speech do work like they are
supposed to in the Oralux distribution.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group