speakup installation instructions
=================================

Installing speakup requires knowledge of building your own
kernel. Hopefully your distro includes speakup in your kernel, so that
you don't have to install it yourself. But if they don't, here are
some basic instructions which assume you understand the kernel
compilation process:

Speakup consists of a patch for the kernel as well as the source for the speakup
modules. To install speakup, perform the following steps:

Unpack your kernel source to a known location such as /usr/src/linux
or ~/linux-version.  If you are installing from a standard linux tar
archive you might unpack a tar archive file with a command such as:

tar jxf linux-2.6.24.tar.bz2

From the location where speakup is unpacked run:

$ ./install ~/linux-2.6.24

(~/linux-2.6.24 is the path where you have unpacked the kernel source)

At this point, you will be presented with messages about patches being
applied to your kernel, followed by a message stating whether or not the
installation was successful.

If the installation was successful, configure, compile and install
your kernel the usual way.  Remember to select speakup and it's
appropriate synthesizer support from the configuration menu.

Upon completion of your new kernel compile follow the normal steps for
it's installation.

You can now boot into your new kernel.

If speakup is built-in to your new kernel it may be started on the
kernel command line or from a boot loader such as grub or lilo by
supplying the appropriate speakup parameters e.g. speakup.synth=xxxx
where 'xxxx' indicates the unique code to represent your synthesizer.
So if you are using a DECTalk Express you would use a KCL argument
such as speakup.synth=dectlk.

If you are loading speakup as modules then you could load it with
modprobe followed by the speakup module for the given synth.  If you
are using a DoubleTalk LT or LiteTalk or TripleTalk serial synth then
you might use:

modprobe speakup_ltlk

You can load any speakup synthesizer with an additional start=0
parameter to make not begin speaking upon a successful load.  To switch
to that synth later then you would use speakup's sysfs pseudo file
support to change to that synth such as:

echo "txprt" >/sys/module/speakup/parameters/synth

This same mechanism can be used to switch between synths which have
been loaded by subsequent modprobe commands or that have been built
into the kernel at compile time.
