Re: Emacspeak on Ubuntu 8.10: best way to go about it?

[Tim Cross <tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David,

I'm running emacspeak on Ubuntu Intrepid. There were some initial
problems with building the speech servers due to the version of
libtool that comes with this version of ubuntu. However, once I sorted
these out, there were no problems. 

I have attached the Makefile I used to build the ViaVoice TTS. You
will need to plce it in the servers/linux-outloud directory. I'm also
using the ViaVoice runtime that comes in the voxin package. I did not
use the scripts/facilities of the voxin package to build things as I
like to keep my emacspeak in a custom location. 

One thing that is really important is that you ensure the speech
server is running before you attempt to run emacspeak. This is
described in the text at the beginning of the emacspeak
makefile. Essentially, you need to cd into the servers directory and
type

./outloud

If the server doesn't run and speak "This is ViaVoice using ALSA" then
there is something wrong and you need to track that down before you
start looking at running emacspeak. 

One of the reasons this is really important is that often you will get
an error message from the speech server when you try to run it that
can help track down the problem. This error message is not seen when
you run emacspeak. If there is a problem with the speech server,
running emacspeak only gives you the Process speaker not running error
message, which is not very helpful in tracking down the
problem. Running outloud from a shell will ensure that the true error
message is shown and this generally will point you in the right
direction to get things working. 

Note that switching to Debian is unlikely to help that much. The
differences between Debian and Ubuntu, particularly for a blind user,
are minimal. You will need the same deb packages installed and you
will still need to compile the necessary TTS libraries. You will be
able to use the default makefile, but I'm attaching one that will work
for Ubuntu Intrepid, so that difference should not be an issue. 

For those who are interested, the only major change I made to the
makefile was to remove libtool from the equation. It should work with
the line

make atcleci.so

I had to remove libtool as the version that comes with ubuntu Intrepid
is much later and has some constraints that were not in earlier
versions that make it a little incompatible with emacspeak. For
example, later versions of libtool will only create a shared library
if the target being used in the makefile has the prefix lib and a
suffix of .a I suspect this behavior could be tweaked by changing the
configuraiton of libtool, but that sort of creates potentially more
problems as you would then have a non-standard libtool configuration
for that platform. 

Note that I'm still using Tclx8.3 and have not yet moved to Tclx8.4,
so you will need to have installed the 8.3 Tclx dev libs to get this
working. 

Tim

Attachment: Makefile
Description: Emacspeak ViaVoice TTS Makefile

David Ring writes:
 > I'm still working on it.  I replaced ALSA for the Ubuntu PulseAudio -
 > I couldn't get it to work.
 > 
 > I am trying to use Voxin with this and I keep on getting speech server
 > process errors with emacspeak.
 > 
 > Since I just replaced Ubuntu with the new Alpha of the next version,
 > is there a distro that is much more straight forward to use with
 > emacspeak and voxin?
 > 
 > Best to all,
 > 
 > David
 > 
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-- 
regards,

Tim

--
tcross@xxxxxxxxxxx