Mandrake 8 and Emacspeak

[tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx]

OK, with assistance from Raman I have managed to get my emacspeak
working under Mandrake 8 with auditory icons as well as ViaVoice. The
trick was as I suspected to use emacspeak-aumix-multichannel-capable-p
set to t. It wasn't working for me because I had an error in my lambda
definition for the emacspeak-startup-hook.

However, once I got that working, I had numerous other
problems. However, I have identified most of them and thought I'd
point out something which may be overlooked by new users to Mandrake
and which causes problems with emacspeak.

As a distribution, Mandrake 8 appears to be a lot more customized 'out
of the box' than most distributions I have used before. While this can
be great for the average user, it can cause complications for those of
us who are use to less customized distributions and those of us who
use less common apps like emacspeak. 

In particular, I had problems with emacspeak doing some weird things
and not speaking buffers - I could get all the standard messages
spoken in the minibuffer etc, and I could get lines spoken if I used
C-e l etc, but moving around with the arrow keys etc didn't work
correctly.

On looking around the system I found that under Mandrake 8, emacs
comes with a site-start.el file in /etc/emacs. There are some very
interesting configurations in this file, but unfortunately some of
them are not compatible with emacspeak. In particular, it sets up
transient-mark-mode, pc-selection modes and modifies the keymaps with
functions to make emacs more xemcas like. Once I commented out some of
the suspect looking lines, emacs and emacspeak appear to be working
correctly. 

Over the next few days I will look at this stuff more closely and see
if any of these configurations are useful and which ones are bad for
emacspeak users. I will then post a modified site-start.el file which
others (both Mandrake and on-mandrake) users may find useful. I just
wanted to provide this early heads up because a number of people have
e-mailed me reporting problems gettting emacspeak to work correctly
under Mandrake.

For anyone interested, I'm running the emu10k1 driver for the
soundblaster live card and it seems very good. I have been told the
latest version of Alsa's driver does now support midi and the emu10k1
developers are planning to do this with the emu10k1 driver as well. I
have not tried the Alsa driver yet. 

Tim
-- 
Tim Cross
NorthNet Internet Services
mailto: tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx
phone: +61 2 6772 5973
mobile: 0412 969193
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