>Now to tie this back to the Mac, what would be very cool is if there >was a means to build Speakup as a set of modules that could be loaded >at boot on the Mac. I don't think it would be impossible given that >Darwin is the underlying os. Now whether it be Speakup or VO, I think >its possible to have a speaking box from boot to shutdown if someone >wanted this and I'm surprised no one has brought this up as a topic. >Sure would help with the Terminal issue. Of course we'd have to have >software speech or get the hardware synth working, but well its just >a thought and something to add to the mix. >I love mixing it up.grin >
It's possible that this would work but you'd have to write it all from scratch because Speakup is hooked deeply into the Linux kernel so there's not a large opportunity for code reuse. If you can properly understand what the Speakup code is doing then you must know a lot about the kernel and its internals. There are a lot of magic numbers floating around that don't make a lot of sense to someone looking at the code at first. And comments in the code are sparse. Then you've still got to get Apple to let you at the low level API's so you can rig speakup or something similar to work. Probably possible. I don't know anything about kernel internals though and everytime I try to learn they change the API. Kernel programming is much different than userspace. Hooking something like Speakup to Darwin's kernel I don't think is even possible since I don't think that code is available under an opensource license. I'll see if I can look at this because I have an idea that something similar for FreeBSD would be neat. Huge project though because you have to understand a bunch of odd kernel code with inline assembly in a lot of places.
