Dectalk Express and HALD

Dectalk Express and HALD

[Keith Wessel]

Hi, all,

I've seen a few threads about this on the net, but no good solutions, and I
thought I'd ask here.

Seems that when using the DecTalk Express and running the HAL daemon, HAL
mucks with the serial ports on its probe just enough to confuse things. This
results in very sluggish (five seconds or more) behavior from the
synthesizer after hald starts up. From what I've read in other posts, this
only effects speakup_dectlk, and no other synths.

I do like running hald for a variety of reasons and would rather not
completely stop the service altogether. For now, I wait for my system to
finish booting, then remove and reload the speakup_dectlk module. Ideally,
though, I'd tell HAL not to touch my serial ports at all. Haven't found how
to do that yet, though, without breaking something else.

Does anyone have any suggstions? Surely, someone out there must be using a
Dectalk Express with Speakup and running HAL. Any advice would be helpful.

Thanks,
Keith

Re: Dectalk Express and HALD

[Adam Myrow]

I have a few lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.local which switch between the "soft" 
driver and Dectalk Express driver.  The switch back and forth will get the 
Dectalk behaving again.  Note that /etc/rc.d/rc.local is a 
Slackware-specific script, but other distros will have something similar. 
Here is what I have.  After doing the switch back and forth, I execute 
speakupconf to load my settings.

#configure Speakup
#First, work around the annoying Dectalk bug.
echo "soft" >/sys/accessibility/speakup/synth
echo "dectlk" >/sys/accessibility/speakup/synth
/usr/local/bin/speakupconf load