On Wed, Oct 4, 2017, at 10:08 AM, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Dave Hunt, on mer. 04 oct. 2017 09:56:56 -0400, wrote:
> > I am trying to get software speech to work on the Stretch net installer, on
> > a machine having multiple sound output possibilities. When typing 's', and
> > pressing enter, at the boot prompt/beep, I am expecting spoken prompts for
> > the installer, but get silence, except for the beeping boot prompt.
>
> Normally the debian installer loops over all sound boards it finds, to
> prompt the user for which one he wants to use. If that doesn't work it
> means there is a problem with the driver of your board. It's no use
> trying to force using a given device: it already does so for each board
> which was discovered.
>
> So unfortunately it's most probably a bug in sound drivers, and more
> information is needed to determine how to fix it, see
> https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#Debian_installer_accessibility
> for the amixer commands to get output of, and the content of
> /proc/asound/cards. Perhaps you can do so from some other image with
> which sound does work, be it knoppix adriane or such.
>
> Samuel
>
I have found that for some reason the Debian sound board selector prompt
does not work on some Broadwell machines. Dave has a Broadwell machine
so I think this might be the problem. It seems to default to the HDMI
output and not loop to the Intel HD Audio card connected to the internal
speakers. I am not sure what is different, however, the sound board
selector on the Arch Linux live cd works with these Broadwell machines.
I copied the asound.conf generated by the Arch Linux sound board
selector to a flash drive and used that to do my Debian install. I
copied it to /etc and then restarted the espeakup process from one of
the extra terminals available when the Debian installer was booted. I
used a braille display for this task. It would be interesting to know
what Arch is doing differently. I don't know a lot about Alsa but maybe
someone with more knowledge in this area might have some ideas.