Re: the push to get rid of CONFIG_VT in the kernel and the future of Speakup

[Chris Brannon <chris@the-brannons.com>]

"John G. Heim" <jheim@math.wisc.edu> writes:

> Yeah, if you're a linux sysadmin, hardware speech is not some luxury
> you can do without.

Well, if the Linux console moves into user space, this doesn't have mean the
end of hardware speech.
Perhaps the way forward is through initramfs?  As a proof of concept, I
built one that had the Speakup modules, audio libraries, and espeakup.
I had *software* speech running from the initramfs.
It was a bit difficult to build it, because I had to figure out all of
the dependencies and add them.  But it worked.
Now, if you're just doing hardware speech, things are going to be much
less complicated, and it should definitely be possible to have it long
before the root partition is mounted, even if the Linux console code
ends up migrating to userspace.

-- Chris