reading the full screen

reading the full screen

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hi all.

I have another straight-forward, though probably loaded question. When
one uses numpad-plus to read the screen, is there a way to control the
size of text chunks speakup sends to the synth, either through
something in /proc/speakup, or in some other way without modifying the
code? The reason I'm asking is because the serial port support in
virtualbox 1.5.2 is still messed up. If reading line by line with
numpad-7 and numpad-9 for example, the bns speaks the text fine in
a virtualbox vm. However, if I attempt reading the full screen, large
chunks of text are skipped, making that feature practically
useless. It's as if there was some sort of handshaking or buffering
issue. It can't be handshaking though, since the same settings worked
just fine for me on physical machines, and even in virtualpc.

On the other hand, if I boot a dos floppy with provox inside
virtualbox, and read the full screen with provox+s, it reads just
fine, though I assume that's because provox sends the data in smaller
chunks, rather than just sending the full screen all at once. If
however there is a program that just sends data to the screen, for
example format.com when formatting a hard drive, I see the same chunk
skipping behavior under provox as well.

Yes, I will be eventually reporting this to innotek, once I've figured
out a way to reproduce the problem without requiring one to have a hardware synth. I
was however hoping for a way to get around the problem in speakup
temporarily, until virtualbox itself gets fixed. Thanks in advance for
any suggestions.

Greg


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Re: reading the full screen

[Gaijin]

Gregory Nowak <greg&romuald,net,eu,org> inquired:

 > When one uses numpad-plus to read the screen, is there a way to
 > control the size of text chunks speakup sends to the synth, either 
through something in
 > /proc/speakup, or in some other way without modifying the code

     I'd sure love to know that one, too.  Executing an:

$ ls /var/log/scripts/*

...in Slackware crashes my synthesizer, probably from an over-filled 
buffer, as the directory is filled with scripts used to install  all the 
software on the system.  I'm sure there is some kind of CTS/RTS 
handshaking going on somewhere, but I can't find any info on it to set 
my synthesizer's parameters.  I wish I could help you.  I tried setting 
the LINES environment variable to 300 to see if the 'less' command would 
say more than 24 lines of text per screen, but I get nothing new. 
Sounds like we have similar problems, anyway.  If I find anything, I'll 
letcha know.

         Michael

PS: Can anyone tell me how this message appears?  Finally got 
Thunderbird to take pasted text from Notepad in a reply, and am 
wondering if lines are still exceeding 72 characters per line.  TIA.

Re: reading the full screen

[Kirk Reiser]

Hi Greg:  I don't remember having a problem like that when I wrote the
original driver.  Check to see if you have hardware handshaking turned
on.  It's been so long I don't have a BNS anymore to test with.


-- 

Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk@braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061

Re: reading the full screen

[Gregory Nowak]

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On Wed, Oct 24, 2007 at 10:43:28PM +0100, Gaijin wrote:
> $ ls /var/log/scripts/*
> 
> ...in Slackware crashes my synthesizer, probably from an over-filled 
> buffer, as the directory is filled with scripts used to install  all the 
> software on the system.

Piping the output through more or less would probably solve that:

$ ls /var/log/scripts/* |more

>  I'm sure there is some kind of CTS/RTS 
> handshaking going on somewhere, but I can't find any info on it to set 
> my synthesizer's parameters.

- From what I recall, and I could be wrong, speakup uses hardware
handshaking when talking to all the supported serial synths.

> PS: Can anyone tell me how this message appears?  Finally got 
> Thunderbird to take pasted text from Notepad in a reply, and am 
> wondering if lines are still exceeding 72 characters per line.  TIA.

Looks just fine here.

Greg


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Re: reading the full screen

[Gregory Nowak]

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Kirk,

This happens with either hardware or software handshaking. Like I've
said, both the fact that I haven't seen this behavior outside of a vm
running in virtualbox, and that provox runs into the same sort of
issue, I think this is a vbox-specific problem, and not a speakup
one. I'll have to do some more testing to verify that, but I do think
that vbox is to blame as of now at least.

Greg


On Wed, Oct 24, 2007 at 08:11:06PM -0400, Kirk Reiser wrote:
> Hi Greg:  I don't remember having a problem like that when I wrote the
> original driver.  Check to see if you have hardware handshaking turned
> on.  It's been so long I don't have a BNS anymore to test with.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
> e-mail: kirk@braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
> phone: (519) 661-3061
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

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Re: reading the full screen

[Frank Carmickle]

On Wed, Oct 24, Gregory Nowak wrote:
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> 
> Kirk,
> 
> This happens with either hardware or software handshaking. Like I've
> said, both the fact that I haven't seen this behavior outside of a vm
> running in virtualbox, and that provox runs into the same sort of
> issue, I think this is a vbox-specific problem, and not a speakup
> one. I'll have to do some more testing to verify that, but I do think
> that vbox is to blame as of now at least.

More at issue here is most likely the scheduler.  I am sure that all of us know very well the trouble one can get in to when running audio on the same system that speakup is running on.  Just listen to an ogg file while listening to screen fulls of stuff.  The other way arround is also true.  If you use a softsynth like ttsynth, even with a small bit of code like spk-connect-ttsynth and you run a bunch of system tasks your synth gets interupted.  I do some silly tricks with renice to help this but it only goes so far.  The fact of the matter is that speakup is not scheduled like other tasks in the kernel.  It runs and when it is done it lets the rest of the system run.  This actually opens a large can o worms.  I suppose that one of the reasons why we like speakup so much is that we like that we can see the screen when we want to see the screen.  Meaning that speakup in a really nasty way preempts everything.  I have excepted this as it is for the time being.  My solution for it is to run speakup on one machine and log in to other machines from their.  Most of us these days are able to find old slow machines that people don't want any more and do this.  I do hope that some day speakup does become a kernel thread and then we can run it on all of our machines.

--Frank

Re: reading the full screen

[Gregory Nowak]

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Well, I haven't been playing audio so far while trying to read the
screen with the bns at the same time yet in the vm. In fact, I didn't
mention that with bns being selected as the default synth, it does get
detected when speakup probes for it, even if the bns is turned off and
unpluged. Again, I haven't seen that happen outside of a vbox vm
either.

Greg


On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 01:43:54PM -0400, Frank Carmickle wrote:
> More at issue here is most likely the scheduler.  I am sure that all of us know very well the trouble one can get in to when running audio on the same system that speakup is running on.  Just listen to an ogg file while listening to screen fulls of stuff.  The other way arround is also true.  If you use a softsynth like ttsynth, even with a small bit of code like spk-connect-ttsynth and you run a bunch of system tasks your synth gets interupted.  I do some silly tricks with renice to help this but it only goes so far.  The fact of the matter is that speakup is not scheduled like other tasks in the kernel.  It runs and when it is done it lets the rest of the system run.  This actually opens a large can o worms.  I suppose that one of the reasons why we like speakup so much is that we like that we can see the screen when we want to see the screen.  Meaning that speakup in a really nasty way preempts everything.  I have excepted this as it is for the time being.  My solution for it is to run speakup on one machine and log in to other machines from their.  Most of us these days are able to find old slow machines that people don't want any more and do this.  I do hope that some day speakup does become a kernel thread and then we can run it on all of our machines.
> 
> --Frank
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> 

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