Re: how to tell which synthesizer is active

[William Hubbs <w.d.hubbs@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 01:26:23PM -0500, John G. Heim wrote:
> Well, I'm not too sure if I am following you completely but I think the new 
> system allows you to get speech for logging in even if you forget to attach 
> your synth before booting. In the past, if you forgot to attach your synth 
> before you booted, you had to log in without speeach and start speech 
> manually.
 
 In the past, we would open all of the serial ports and look for the
 synthesizer, so if we didn't find it on a port we didn't attempt to initialize
 it and we just left speakup in the system, but told it that there
 wasn't a synthesizer connected.  Now, we  skip this probing step and
 assume that the synthesizer is on port 1 unless you give a command line
 parameter telling us otherwise.

> I understand why John C. wants to be able to tell which synth module is 
> being used. If you could do that, then you could put the driver for the 
> hardware synth in the initrd but if it wasn't attached, you could load the 
> software speech module and use software speech. I used to have my laptop set 
> up to do that. All it did was grep the output from lsmod for the driver for 
> my hardware synth. If it didn't find it, it loaded the software speech 
> driver and started speech-dispatcher.
> 
> 
> Maybe there's something in lsmod that actually indicates which driver is 
> active.
 
I think John builds the hardware synth driver into the kernel and builds
the software synth driver as a module.  I think he is wanting to use the
synth sys file to tell when we have deactivated the hardware synth
because of too many time outs.

William