remote booting

remote booting

[Nick Allan]

Hi all
I had a situation the other day that I hope someone can give me a
satisfactory solution to.
I needed to reboot one of my linux systems from work the other day.  It
just happens that the system I needed to reboot was running speakup.  It
took the system ages to come back online due to speakup speaking
absolutely everything during the startup sequence.  This is great when I'm
actually at the console, but a pain when i'm remote.
Other than switching the doubletalk lt off before I leave, does anyone
have any solutions to the above problem?


Regards Nick
nallan@wdev.net

Re: remote booting

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

Having your synth on shouldn't slow your system down.  I say shouldn't, as
I know it does in certain cases.  What you want to do is to minimise the
impact that prelonged speech has on your system.  This is not easy and I
advise anyone who wants to try this to go and read Kirk's message about how
to do this and how dangerous it is, before starting ... and if you still
don't understand what these values mean, ask first.

My synth uses the transport driver.  This loads with a default
configuration of delay time 550, jiffy delta 5 and trigger time 50.  I've
found that lowering jiffy delta to 4 and trigger time to 40 and raising
delay time to 550 will allow my computer to keep on decoding an MP3, for
example, instead of stopping when reading a screen full of text.  This is
really a "see what works for you" type thing, and I can't really suggest
good values, especially since you use a different synth.

Be particularly careful with jiffy delta.  This directly controls the
kernel's timing as it configures how many jiffies (10th of a second) it
allocates to speakup.  Lowering the value will not cause any problems
(IIRC), but raising it much higher could cause *major badness to happen*.
You have been warned.

Of course, now that I've written all this, it occurs to me that your system
will have to at least partially boot before such altered settings could
come into effect.  any chance of making these command line params, Kirk?

Geoff.

Re: remote booting

[Kirk Reiser]

Geoff Shang <gshang@uq.net.au> writes:

> Of course, now that I've written all this, it occurs to me that your system
> will have to at least partially boot before such altered settings could
> come into effect.  any chance of making these command line params, Kirk?

Hmmm, a person should really need to fuck with these at all once the
correct values have been determined.  I think I would suggest that if
changing them in a start-up script isn't good enough they could change
the default values in the code and recompile.  If they don't know
where they are in the code a question here or on the reflector and we
can tell them where to find them.

If someone finds better values in general then we have found for a
given synth, they should let us know so the defaults can be changed
and everyone with that synth will reap the benefits.

  Kirk

-- 

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

Re: remote booting

[Kirk Wood]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Geoff Shang wrote:
> Having your synth on shouldn't slow your system down.  I say shouldn't, as
> I know it does in certain cases.  

One specific case where I have seen it slow a computer down is when a
screen full of information is sent out my roommate's computer will pause
until the buffer of the synth catches up. The most clear example of this
kind of thing is at boot. If speech is silenced the prompt will come up
faster. (It shows up on the screen faster not just that you hear it
sooner.)

=======
Kirk Wood
Cpt.Kirk@1tree.net

Nothing is hard if you know the answer or are used to doing it.

Re: remote booting

[Geoff Shang]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Kirk Wood wrote:

> One specific case where I have seen it slow a computer down is when a
> screen full of information is sent out my roommate's computer will pause
> until the buffer of the synth catches up. The most clear example of this
> kind of thing is at boot. If speech is silenced the prompt will come up
> faster. (It shows up on the screen faster not just that you hear it
> sooner.)

AFAIK, this is the sort of thing that shouldn't happen.

A good way I've found to check is to play an MP3 or something, then read a
screenful of text and see if it stops.  It shouldn't.

Geoff.